Clade Song 6

Small Volcano of a Mushroom, Pushing Through Soil

So, what’s the quarry? summit?
one-sided wintergreen?

or rough descent on rock and moss
to a good spot for drinking tea?

Stand on a boulder at creekside:
point with your stick to a bog orchid

one boot on a wine-red vein of silt
driven through sweeps of coarser sand:

cross-grained, flecked with mica—sunlight
a few million years from its birth

Summit photo: entirely cloud
Vireo in the aspen: silent but clear

I have other lives
but do not know how to exist

without this one

Susan Tichy is the author of five books, most recently Trafficke (Ahsahta Press, 2015), a mixed-form meditation on family, race, history, and the powers of language. Her previous Ahsahta books are Gallowglass (2010) and Bone Pagoda (2007). She teaches in the BFA & MFA programs at George Mason University, and when not teaching lives in Colorado, in an owner-built, passive-solar cabin at 9000 feet in the western foothills of the Sierra Mojada/Wet Mountains, facing the Wet Mountain Valley and the Colorado Sangre de Cristo range. “Pockets of Detail, Unsurrounded” and “Small Volcano of a Mushroom Pushing through Soil” are from a new manuscript, The Avalanche Path in Summer.