Christien Gholson

What holds everything together

The Douglas-fir’s dead body is not dead. How can it be
dead, half of it still standing, twenty feet into the sky,
trunk five yards in diameter? I place my palm against
the bark, feel the curves of bark beetle galleries beneath,
and the hollow deeper still, the emptiness that holds this
tree together.

There are times when I can feel that same emptiness
inside me, the space that stitches together all the parts
of this body—skate-made ripples of pond water, blood
and cortisol, sawdust, marbled meat, and a few red
needles sinking into mud, into the mycelium ley lines
that hold this entire forest together.

What’s alive and what’s not is unclear here. Listen—
the ecstatic energy of decay, breaking down all bodies
into their source elements. Listen—resurrection is close:
the beat of a heart, shadows moving from tree to tree,
a flurry of dead needles floating down onto dead leaves.
What’s alive and what is not is unclear everywhere.

I’ve known this space. Nights in childhood, reaching
out and recoiling from the dark around and inside me.
It has always been here, looking in our windows,
curious, sometimes leaving things under the pillow—
a beetle leg, a pebble of green sea glass, a fish scale
able to reveal the colors hidden inside cold moonlight.

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Christien Gholson is the author of The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing); On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press); All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press); and the novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). A long eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, “Tidal Flats,” can be found at Mudlark, along with its sequel, “Solutions for the End of the World,” at The American Journal of Poetry. He lives in Oregon. http://christiengholson.blogspot.com/.