the sign tells us, is diversity. No suburban rows
of plant development here. Not the same shapes stretching
in perpendicular regularity from my eye as we drove
hundreds of miles, past fields of almond and apricot
exactingly spaced. Endless lines of precise grapevines
and the pumpjacks nodding heavy heads in time
through California’s hypnotic central valley,
until we arrived at our home for a night. Our unknown
host welcomed from every wall and pillow,
with nearly identical Christian sentiments,
cultivated and displayed in regular rows. God is love.
You are loved. The embroidery says: Consider the lilies
of the field, and I do, deciding he must have meant
meadow unless he was walking amidst a greenhouse
with blooms grown only to be cut and Jesus was making
a point about high-margin yields and pragmatic hands
more than the miracle of meadow. Below Yosemite’s
cliffs, at the foot of its highest waterfall, we stand
by a stretch of green that when passed at 25 miles
an hour just looks like grass. To my suburban eyes a chore.
But to others these blades are food, shelter, or baskets— deer
grass being what the Ahwahneechee tribes prized
for their weaving. Their preference tended not by plows
but by fire. The same flames we’re told sequoias need
to open their cones, the seeds only unlocked by tongues
that hollow their hulking trunks with burns so large
I could stand inside without bowing my head. I bent
my forehead to bark and said thank you though I don’t
speak the electric tongue of trees whose roots we know now
are not dumb but abuzz with warning or comfort or the gospel
of rain. No sign of clouds in the sky today. Or maybe
there’s a message I miss as I read that not many places
have the right mix of soil, frequency of fire, and water
to cultivate what to us seems wild. The grass
of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into
the oven and he must have meant me, the unnamable blades
that have thrived in the life I burned to the ground,
fire held fast in my own shaking hand, hesitant while
chiding gospels scolded o you of little faith. How many
ways can a life rise from its ashes, I wonder. And the words
of Mark affirm: a meadow accepts itself as various. I look
to the sky for a sign, some cloud in the shape of a need
I cannot name. I test the wind with my tongue,
as a torch song burns my lips, smoke filling
my lungs with a longing to bow to the ground.
Erica Charis-Molling is a poet, educator, and librarian. Her writing has been published in Crosswinds, Presence, Glass, Anchor, Vinyl, Entropy, and Mezzo Cammin and is forthcoming in Redivider. She’s an alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She currently lives in Boston, where she works as Education Director for Mass Poetry.