Ed. note: Poet Ellaraine Lockie recently sent me a series of poems to consider for the City Creatures Blog. The poems are part of a collection she’s putting together about “taking walks in both cities and countrysides.” I was intrigued. As a regular walker, I advocate for walking in all weather, in all seasons, as one of the best sorts of city creatures-seeking activities.
Ellaraine’s poems (below) have been ordered with a narrative path in mind. The first, “Touché in a Villanelle,” cleverly plays with the villanelle form and its circular, overlapping, and repeating rhyme schemes—which, just like walking, carries a reader/walker to the same spots but with minor and important variations. Walks such as these cultivate attention to other species, opening our senses toward the often unnoticed or uncared for creatures who might otherwise be dismissed (“After the Exterminator”), while tapping into our own reservoir of subjective memories and associations (“Earthworms in My Hand”). A remarkable thing about these interactions, as Ellaraine’s poems evoke so beautifully, is that our lives can be changed as a result. Even past fears may morph into new musics (“Encounters with Crows”), with a whoosh of wings and the chiming of bells. The “new of elsewhere” is always already right in front of us, just out the door.
Portions from two of the poems, “Earthworms in My Hand” and “Encounters with Crows,” are available to listen to as part of the collection Wild as in Familiar, on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/wild-as-in-familiar/id675973899
Touché in a Villanelle
Why would you walk the same block every day
Neighbors ask as I back and forth tread
Nothing has changed since yesterday they say
The same people, cars, trees and footway
Resident robins, jays, doves overhead
So why would you walk the same block each day
But hey, today sprinklers make rainbow rays
and road quartz twinkles from light’s fountainhead
Only flashes of yesterday they say
What about overnight mushrooms, sachet
burst of rose, squirrels out of featherbeds
Why would you walk the same as last May
asks a man who joins me at his driveway
He preaches the new of elsewhere instead
because little here has changed in a day
As the two of us make a fifth foray
past the bikini’d woman painting a shed
I say: if little has changed since yesterday
why would you walk the same block today
After the Exterminator
The next morning cockroaches
dot the driveway on their backs
Thread legs beating the air like they’re peddling
an old-fashioned sewing machine
Trying to sew a few more stitches of life
Hours which weave the fabric
of death in turtle time
We do this to them
after 350 million years of survival
Their anti-reward for existing
longer than any other species on earth
Dr. Kevorkian turned-guerrilla-war-commander
takes control of my feet
and orders the quick crunch of bodies
Each like a metal snap
popping on a homemade dress
The ones in the grass more like buttons
slipping through holes
as they sink into the quiet of soil
All with the efficiency of a frog’s meal
or a bullet through the head
Earthworms in My Hand
Hundreds of them evacuated to pavement
or swimming in rivered gutters after heavy rain
I step around them on my morning walk
stopping to pick up the plumpest
to carry back to my first garden
Their squirms demand immediate release
Yet only half of them wiggle away
in their new home
Water current having redefined
the others as floaters whose multiple hearts
didn’t out-pummel the sky’s assault
Determined to get my own heart pumping
I walk away from these small deaths
through their dollhouse Katrina wake
Look through a naturalist’s eyes
at crows dive-bombing for breakfast
But can’t accept the fate
of a car’s turn into the cul-de-sac
The oblivious mother pushing a stroller
down the sidewalk
Nor the memory of Uncle Otto’s body
at the bottom of the Missouri River
Rescues in the scoop of one hand
The hollow of the other
Back aching and writing deadline waiting
these missions claim the entire morning
Neighbors stop to compliment my compassion
They don’t see my father’s faraway gaze into grief
Or my want of a man like these elfins
Who slither on their natural lubricants
over palms and between fingers
And follow nerves that end in other places
Grey/blue fingers that knead hard soil
into spring flowers
Encounters with Crows
The caw-caw from low in the acacia tree
grated like sandpaper
Too close and aggressive to be conversational
More like the threat of thunder
Or an adrenaline needle plunged into memory
of a black storm a foot from my face
Eyes as still as the storm’s center
offset by slap of wings and flap of beak
The cause of a daily walk with weapons
An umbrella or baseball bat
and the armor of a wide-brimmed hat
Yet the pummeling from my own heart
The rock of dread so heavy and deep that Hitchcock
has buried his playground scene beneath it
These ghosts do not rest in peace
They peck away wanting recognition
for the job of nature’s clean-up crew
For transforming death into life
They want awareness of black bigotry
and encroachment on orchards and fields
By those who hear the unnerving calls but not
the varied clicks, rattles and bell-like tones
Music ignored by those
who mistake the need for nest hair
as an act of aggression
One morning the sky blurs with half notes
Airwaves carry a cacophony of caws
In the oak tree hundreds of crows
hunch their shoulders with each cry
The sandpaper shield covers a baby fallen from its nest
And I feel the rock move in my chest
The whoosh of wings as Hitchcock’s ghosts fly away
Handfuls of cat food litter the patio now
A plastic bag with brown curly hair protruding
from holes hangs from an oak tree
I sometimes sit in the backyard straining to hear
sounds that hint of childhood church bells
Like it was Easter Sunday
Photo credits, top to bottom: Tony Alter, “Mushroom’s Everywhere,” Creative Commons license 2.0; mingusmutter, “Crucified cockroach,” Creative Commons license 2.0; Joel Abroad, “Huge blue earthworm,” Creative Commons license 2.0; Wonderlane, “Crow, crow…” Creative Commons license 2.0.
