women and nature

(and to finish off our series of (mostly) american women printmakers,
i offer you....)

“I am thinking of the communion I felt as a child in the Sierra under trees or in fields of wildflowers. I told no one what I felt. In my small world, no one referred to mystical experience, even in the church I attended.

I had not yet read Emerson, nor had I heard the story of how, as a young man, when John Muir discovered a cluster of rare orchids, called Calypso borealis, growing by the edge of an icy pond, deep in the outback of Ontario, he sat down and wept for joy, feeling that he ‘was in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come.’”

Susan Griffin 1

from HOUSE of STONE and SONG

Because we live in a country where
no one I know
sings to God in the streets,
I’m given to wandering past margins of fern and wild honeysuckle,

following the burr of the tanager, that lazy, drowsy
dozy buzz of triple notes
tied close together. I’m tethered and led, legato,

deeper in, beyond cedar field and hardscrabble, through
grapevine, bullbrier,
gloves of rhododendron and laurel lamp-lighting my way

over Indian graves and wetland, hellebore and hummock,
into the tall trees where
that flash of pure fire finds its high-branch summer niche.

Perhaps I want to be the crazy woman
who lives on roots and berries
in the only woods abandoned to her....

— Margaret Gibson 2

GENESIS

Far from the sea, the lilies grow
and listen for the sea.

Long ago, they bloomed near the shore,
and the small crustaceans,
red-backed crabs,
scurried under the pale exotic plants
that rocked on thin stems
half-flower, half-shell.

It’s a long way from the beginning.

The heavenly beasts appear in the sky,
unchanged
since the first seeds fell on the fields
in a green rain,
and men climbed from the water
on two legs,
unsteady as baby goats.

In the wind now
the white flowers rise and bend
in the grass, like the heads of sheep.
Behind the mountains
the waves rise and fall. The stars open.

No one has left the garden.

— Barbara Jordan 3

in autumn town

AUTUMN GRASSES
(Shibata Zeshin,
Autumn Grasses,
two-panel screen)


In fields of bush clover and hay-scent grass
the autumn moon takes refuge
The cricket's song is gold



Zeshin's loneliness taught him this

Who is coming?
What will come to pass, and pass?


Neither bruise nor sweetness nor cool air
not-knowing
knows the way




And the moon?
Who among us does not wander, and flare
and bow to the ground?

Who does not savor, and stand open
if only in secret

taking heart in the ripening of the moon?

Margaret Gibson




From Autumn Grasses
by Margaret Gibson.
Copyright © 2003 by Margaret Gibson.
Reproduced with permission of Louisiana State University Press.
All rights reserved.

the flights of birds

The speaker of this poem, "Summer Birds and Flowers," is someone looking at a scroll by Shikibu Terutada from the sixteenth century.

Unrolling
the coiled scroll
enacts the momentary

sweeping down the midday sky
of small birds
on a draft from the distant

blue ravines
and mountain ridges
into the windy clearing
of summer's
middle distance, so luminous
and near
it's hard to see

elegantly disguised
by graceful hollyhocks

and stalks of amber iris
that steeply
lean into the emptiness

that borders
the tended garden path

Any fear of what imperils

and impends
is tempered—
so that the tidal and jagged line
of the far mountains
seems merely an artful

mapping of the birds'
arc of flight
And such a glimmer of gaiety
as they dip and swoop
with unguarded ease
into the inseparable
immensity

my heart stops now
as I think of it

© margaret gibson

(from 'autumn grasses')

(ohara; hoytema; bracquemond; hokusai; unknown; ohara?; ohara)