Leaving

(Storyknife, Homer, Alaska)

I’m just a tourist in the visible world

Adam Zagajewski

I’ll pack my bags, try to fit all the stones I found on Bishop’s Beach—the wishing stones, graywacke cobbles with quartz scribbles and circles, rust-colored chips, one tiny white pebble. They will travel in my suitcase from Alaska to Mississippi, where stones from all my journeys are piled on my bookshelves or surround the roots of my potted plants. Not that I even know any longer where some of them came from. I know only that on a morning or afternoon as I was walking a road or beach or forest trail, a stone caught my attention, and I picked it up because it wanted to travel a little further, go where I was going, it wanted my hand to hold and warm it, my fingers to smooth along it or feel its jagged edges. It wanted me to feel its heft or tininess and carry it in my palm or slip it into my pocket, and at last to take it out and arrange it on a windowsill or shelf, keeping company with the others who had called me. But why do I find myself calling stones “who”? Because once every hundred years a stone breathes, someone said. Because every entity, even a stone, is possessed of a soul—a stone soul, born of the fire and earth, and taking shape, attaining relative stillness. You think this is fanciful, ridiculous? More ridiculous it is to think we do not live in a universe that sees us and calls to us.

And from my cabin, in windy light—
the ocean full of whitecaps
the dying fireweed

the moose with her twin yearlings
crossing the grass,
disappearing into shadow

snow blazes in the sun on Iliamna

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poems, Paradise Is Jagged, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in 2023. Her sixth book is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin, 2019), and her fifth, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay, is Mississippi (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, Ann coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 3rd printing 2020). A senior fellow of The Black Earth Institute, she has received three Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry awards, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, and a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and has had numerous residencies as well as Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Mississippi, where she also directed the program in Environmental Studies.