Ed. note: Ellaraine Lockie is the Center for Humans and Nature’s Artist-of-the-Month for June 2019. Her poetry has appeared previously on the City Creatures Blog. We are pleased to share this selection of Ellaraine’s poems, which traces the tangled lines that connect us to the lives of our nonhuman neighbors in the city. Her poems move gracefully between the living details of inner and outer worlds, lifting out correspondences that carry readers from “the earthworm’s multiple hearts” to “the Home Depot parking lot.” Her new chapbook, Sex & Other Slapsticks, is now available.
An American Haibun
Mini-flocks of eight or ten wild parrots often emblazon the trees in my yard. A stopover en route to or from the Home Depot parking lot. As though picking up supplies for ongoing nest repair.
Green red and yellow
packages slur the airwaves
Jingle of chatter
Today bells ring the sky from blocks away. The entire flock arrives as I close the front door behind me for my walk. The surreal surprise of sixty-some parrots. Bodies built for South America that have branched the skies of Northern California for thirty years. Their evolution from a few slave-traded rebels and rejects. And their sheer spirit for survival stops me mid-step.
Ornaments on palm
filbert cherry blackberry
Breeze of wings folding
I refuse to relinquish either the exercise or the parrots. So I walk fast circles around the driveway. Tree-to-tree talk, as affable as small town gossip over clotheslines. Drowning echoes of the morning’s Mercury crime-corruption-jobless-foreclosure-war News. . . and the crinkle of worry by fingers on fabric over a breast lump.
Beaks fill with nectar
from eucalyptus blossoms
Bright pink petals fall
Dizzy now, I switch to a house-wide back-and-forth stride. Envision that every Silicon Valley soul in torment could line up right here. Like the way back-to-belly cars parade slowly around this cul-de-sac to see Christmas lights.
Sprinkler shower play
Parrots groom one another
The sun sends glitter
Every feather a rainbow. Every squawk an upbeat, a hallelujah. An invitation to plan the next thirty years. Even the native crows acquiesce their territory to this gift. But it is I who am repaired.
Mother of Trees
—After The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
You don’t mention to the mostly multilingual neighbors
that although you can’t speak their languages
you understand that of trees
How you feel the ultrasonic screams as one
of those neighbors hacks down a healthy pine tree
A little each day like Hannibal Lecter would
until a concrete driveway deadens its SOS
How a chainsaw severs dreams at night
after the sweet gums gracing the sidewalk
are reduced to stumps
The word messy, one that nuthatches
chickadees and finches can’t fathom
The same trees that beckoned you
on morning walks to tear ivy off their barks
Patting them as a mother would her injured child
The apricot tree that fed
the cul-de-sac jam for thirty years
Slain, by new owners who wanted
nothing alive in their front yard
You shudder to think what they did
with the dwarf orange you gave them
as a housewarming gift
Then there’s the neighbor who butchered
your own 40-year oak grove when you were gone
so he could have more sunlight
Squirrels deprived of acorns
Nests naked to predators
You stripped of privacy, shade and serenity
You mourn the lost songs of falling branches
crackling leaves, swish in wind, the hum during storms
But the mother tree vibrates lament for offspring
she nourished from seed to sapling to full grown
Her wooden heart broken
Walk with Earthworms
Forced from flooded burrows
They interrupt the wet sidewalk
in pencil-gray punctuations
Squiggles that swim in the margin of gutters
Some of the soft bodies writing their ways
under brittle maple leaves
I’m as fragile this morning
as their flushed-vein colored flesh
Rain bruised without buffer
of umbrella or outerwear
My body italicized
bending into stings of sorrow
Zeus is having none of it
And claps his thunderous hands in distant
applause for his night crawling creations
For their capacity to reconstruct amputated parts
To consume the world’s waste
and return it gift wrapped as compost
He sends the sun as harbinger
Burrows dry until the next disaster
Evergreens and grass glisten
surrounded by dying leaves
Lobelia blossoms battle weeds for survival
Oranges betray California winter
in crayon color
But even the washed-out hues of a rainbow
fill only a fraction of the sky
Shadows skulk like hellhounds
behind dog days of summer
And I wonder how many
of an earthworm’s multiple hearts
have to crush before it can’t regenerate
Wings Clipped
What about the butterfly my grandson asks
The Monarch on the sidewalk flaps
one and a half wings
Do we hammer him between newspapers
I mercy killed a mouse last month
Now it gets tricky
Playing God
No I say—It isn’t suffering so much
that we need to end the pain
We gently place it on a nearby bush
to become part of the food chain
How do you know he asks
He’s six and wants to know
how mirrors are made too
I don’t know for sure I say
falling from my stellar branch
Drawing Breath
In bed at midnight I keep the light
after strapping on the masked armor
against sleep apnea
Rise above this rape by air
and into a Stephen King character
Whose problems are worse than an unforgiving
sea storm forcing its way down a windpipe
A long balloon pumped to the point of burst
Over and over an insufficiency
to exhale against the assault
Anxiety a little like death in its aloneness
On the ceiling a crane fly competes
with King’s protagonist for my attention
Flits from one glow-painted star to another
A wee astronaut exploring the solar system
with wings that speak louder than written words
I look up its homepage on my laptop
She doesn’t wonder which breath will be her last
Doesn’t know about her three-day lifespan
Doesn’t even feel the need to eat
She knows another need and wants to find him fast
Is willing to search the entire universe
for one quick contribution to perpetuity
I could put a glass over her
and turn her outside right now
Or I could wait for morning
to become the fairy godmother of mating
Reach up and switch off her sun
Find solace in the shine
of the smallest moon and stars
The flickering shadows of a familiar
An angel of mercy who brings
breath like the slack tide
Credits
