Dear Readers, I have been following Alaskan poet Erin Coughwell Hollowell for years now, and as this week saw the US being pulled out of the Paris Climate Change accord by That Man, it seems appropriate to feature some of her exquisite poems about the ephemerality  of the natural world (and much else besides).  See what you think.

These three poems are online here.

Cycles and Limits

Nothing is consumed whole. Nothing.
We put the bread, the nuts, the sweet apple

into our mouths and chew. Standing at
the counter, I take care to chop the carrots

into equal sized pieces as the potatoes
so that it might all cook together. Be taken

along with a chopped onion for savor
and digested. The cottonwood tree

that leaned for so long finally falls. Impact
shatters the rotten trunk, the branches

scatter across the forest floor. Then moss
and beetle and rain get to work. After

a few years, after the hares have sheltered
beneath and dug among, the tree becomes

soil. Becomes mushroom that I gather
and add to the soup. It becomes impossible

to imagine any other end point. Some day
I will be alone. If there is singing, I will not

hear it. If someone is saying words about
my life, parsing out the good things I tried

to do, I will not attend. My atoms uncoupling.
My consumption, my alchemy, already under way.

Alaskan dirt road duet in a minor key

In the grey morning, I find beside the road
two large footprints coupled with two small

and I worry. Grandmother hare, now arrayed
white for the winter and the snows delayed,

you are trying to tell me something. Stillness
in the deep alder thicket that was shattered

by unseasonable rain followed by wet snow
followed by rain. Golden hare eye the only

thing tilting toward me as I walk. A season
of rain in a place that signifies snow. Six

diesel trucks with empty beds and a single
occupant rattle by each morning on a road

that has only eight houses. As soon as
it is light, I walk the edges and hope not

to see you. You keep living if you live
small. Alongside me, your prints are

a dancing. I keep you living if I live small.

After the dissolution

When we tell of this, the we that remains
five hundred years from now, our storied glacier

will be so small. Who could imagine this
great being of ice scored with huge crevices?

We’ll say that glaciers were white, because
we won’t imagine that ice becomes blue

as the weight of it presses out centuries
of air. We won’t remember gray moraines

comprised of stones rounded by the rolling
of so much power advancing and retreating.

We won’t tell of rivers a shade of turquoise
that stuns the eyes, carrying glacial flour

and ice’s breath to the sea. And those huge
boulders left in the middle of fields, we’ll

imagine that men put them there for some
reason. We’ll have forgotten how the tongues

of glaciers could rearrange the earth. We’ll
have forgotten how a glacier could tell a story

that reminded us of how small we are,
how brief our lives that misunderstood forever.