by Laura Vogt
NOTES ON A RENEWAL
I.
Alongside my bones, evergreen vines wither
and dissolve. Summertime growth, ceased.
I am a forest, where every shoot has been
sliced, every leaf crinkled into brown.
II.
Some time ago I remembered
that I was grieving. I sifted through
all that I carried, like a chestnut-leather
satchel full of gemstones, each discovery
another forgotten horror. I wasn’t sure
which trauma to lift, hold toward the light,
let glow shine through, which one to inhale
and live through again, which one to bury
in the woodland beneath the sycamore roots,
which one to finally release.
III.
Elm, maple, eastern hemlock, aspen.
Pine-green overstory, saturated understory.
The world made of smoke and sand,
everything smudged and forgotten, once more.
There was that day, perhaps it was yesterday,
when I picked up handfuls of dead leaves,
carried them in my palms, away. I didn’t know
why I cleaned the forest. Didn’t know why
I thought something could be contained.
But I organized, and I mopped, time moving thick
and slow, the leaves wet and scenting of soil and shadow
and loss, myself slipped into another dimension of sorrow.
IV.
I need you to be my perennial. A hardy shoot
that returns to me each year. Perhaps ivy brambles
or wintergreen or that puffy honeysuckle at the bend.
Return to me, twine deep within soil, root into
bedrock, do not leave. I need you to be leaf
and earthy scents and twigs crackling underfoot,
trauma forever paralleling us, but never overtaking,
myself rooted in shadow and soil and new growth.
OUT AND BEYOND
Out beyond the grass
and the lofty sycamore—
bark bone-white
above ancient gray—
out beyond the soft hill,
today’s light is falling.
Green leaves now lank,
crackled chestnut-brown
leaves scattering the understory.
And on over and beyond
the path gold spears and soaks—
that pause of gloaming.
I glimpse peace, am
stirred to revive. Out
and beyond, I’m
rooted into soil. Arms
gnarled bark, hair bramble
and vine, fingers new
shoots. I’m learning
how to become.
ONCE UPON A FOREST, FORTY YEARS LATER
Once, I was the little girl with the wicker basket;
now I’m a swirl of smoke and ocean-white
hair. Something vaporous, something that’s readying
to release—fleeting or fleeing. When the girl bends
beneath the green arch of brambles, the grove deepens
into hues of emerald and shadow, like a faded vintage
hardback returning her to a world of once ago,
the tale of the gold-lit meadow glen, the basket
of wildflowers, the choice to hesitate—time being
something you shouldn’t grip. Hurry on, darling,
someone should say. Don’t tarry. Don’t listen
to the wolf. She doesn’t understand what she could lose.
No one ever does. I wonder if they’d change,
if they knew. Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s time, passing
on the ever-revolving clock: my form losing density
year after year; along the ridge of my body, I loosen
and swell. I age. In the woodland, light kaleidoscopes
through the leaves, the knots and nodes and points
of the sugar maple lit by butter and lime colors,
gold of sunshine, green of forest. And she continues
on beyond the flower meadow, her basket rounded
by many blooms, a silhouette following, silver and soot
flickering between black-splotched birch saplings, tousled fur
in shades of gray—wool, shale, vapor, quartz, ashwood.
Once, I was the little girl gathering wildflowers,
searching between sunbeam and leaf and path for
adventure. But now, I’m the one with gray hair, waiting
on someone else’s exploration. Roles alter on a wheel.
I didn’t know I had turned—until the wheel had clicked
forward on the arc. Soon enough one generation folds
into another, brume rewinding to glow. Some glimpse
the change, others overlook the interval. As for me,
I will open wide my basket, collect colors—peridot and
strawberry, cloud-blue and ocean, sunglow and lemon—
but also, all the dull grays of aging. Let them come.
My basket has room.
LAURA VOGT
Laura Vogt's bestselling debut, In the Great Quiet, is a sweeping, transportive historical novel based on her ancestor. She attended the University of Iowa Writing Workshop program in Ireland and has been published in various journals, including Lit Hub, Fourteen Hills, Pleiades, Writer's Digest, and Enchanted Living Magazine. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband and three children.
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