INTO THE ERUPTION

Into the Eruption

Our species denies
the paradigm of power,
stone walls breached by roots.

How to entangle
our veins with the vines of earth,
to be mountain grapes.

To be light . . . wine-dyed,
seized by shadow. To be waves . . .
tides broken by wind.

I need images
to collide with these forces,
to ignite language . . .

mismatched images . . .
wood-cloud spiders . . . to be honed
into cutting words.

Haiku’s middle turn
opens me to pulse and glow . . .
firefly and ember.

I pause in Haiku’s
pause. I fly into hot coals.
I taste the sizzle.

A Cool Wall to Hug

I draw green whirlwinds
to transform clichéd landscapes.
I rise with the dust.

I watch glaciers melt,
exposing the mother lode.
I yearn to burrow . . .

to burrow in dirt
older than the trees I felled
for my molding home.

It's complicated,
feeling desire without care.
Tree leaves with no roots.

Desire must suffice.
Lava steaming toward a cliff,
the sea set afire.

I still trust granite
toe holds, cracks to crawl inside.
The cool wall asks me

to stop burning ditches,
leave them to buffalo grass . . .
to their starry seeds.

Sustained by Mordant

I cry as I dye
this cloth with last year’s summer.
Dew-dropped peonies.

I poke my finger
into paint, smear clay across
holes we’ve made in sky.

Mordanting walnut
to this page leaves dye behind . . .
my hands graced with rust.

Thick paint coats me, dark
as the breeze of a deep cave.
Shadow exhales thought,

reminds me to breathe
in the gift of oxygen,
the scent of oak leaves.

Shadow steers me through
woods, my arm out the window,
my fingers dyed green.

The last time I hugged
a tree, its rough bark kissed back.
Brush strokes on my cheek.

I am an acorn
falling to musty humus.
Earth cracking open.

Let there be . . .

blueberries . . . all such
miracles to shock us out
of complacency,

fruit to sharpen dull
tongues, rote lips . . . to dye our words
with revelation.

Let us trust in such
epiphanies. May we paint
our faces with faith . . .

tattoo endurance
to our feet, grit to bellies,
hope to hollow wings.

May we keep seeking
the top of the universe
where Rain learned to fall,
where Sun turned Earth from darkness,
where Ocean threw us to shore.

Mary Catherine Harper, Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient and 2019 Poet in Residence at Cape Cod Fine Arts Work Center, has two published collections—The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems (2022) and Some Gods Don’t Need Saints (2016)—as well as numerous poems in journals and art in Wild Roof Journal and Invisible City. She has presented her hybrid art/poetry works at the Nelson Gallery in Lansing, MI (The Sights and Sounds of Haunted Lives, 2024). See marycatherineharper.org, and swampfire.org and facebook.com/groups/swampfire for her support of fellow artists and writers.