Featured Poet: Sarah Chayes
Sarah Chayes is the author of three works of nonfiction, including the 2016 L.A. Times prizewinner Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, and Corruption in America — And What Is at Stake. She is working on The Potomac: An Invitation to Change Course. These poems came in reverent exchange with that river.
An Introduction by Askold Melnyczuk:
Sarah Chayes’ anatomy of greed, On Corruption in America, offers a stunningly elegant examination of the way the love of money has undermined human societies. By way of episodes ranging from Midas to Jeffrey Epstein, she lays bare the structure of systemic corruption. Also a cri-de-coeur on behalf of our ailing planet. The book ends with an outline of just how we might still save ourselves from the worst consequences of our money-madness. “Let’s revive our precious swamps and nurture them, and with them, a human culture and politics that—unpolluted by money—are hospitable to life,” is the injunction, and concluding sentence, of this essential volume.
Chayes left her job as an NPR correspondent after covering conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Between 2002 and 2009, she lived in Afghanistan where she launched a cooperative that produced high-end skincare products from licit local agriculture. The aim was to help Afghan farmers transition away from cultivating poppies back to the horticulture for which the region is famous. In 2010 she became a special advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.
All of which might make the work we’re presenting here all the more surprising.
Chayes has now turned her acute powers of observation onto the natural world. No longer attending to the latest explosion, she listens instead to the far subtler, ancient symphonies of our forests and streams. The result is a trove of poems she calls “Potomac Psalmody” -- in honor of the river that inspired them. They prove again the truth of Hopkins’ declaration: “Nature is never spent.” Its currency is freely given to all with the good sense to look for it. Indeed, nature supports us even when we’re not looking. Chayes’ tight lyric evocations offer sonic delights, while also giving rise to a revised battle-cry:
Will you fight them
On their grounds in their words?
You will lose
And lose
And lose
Lose, lose
Fight elsehow.
Fight with the cry of the osprey,
The stillness of the bittern –
The small one, stalking.
This battle requires no weapons. It asks us only to open our hearts and finetune our senses, and recognize that we dwell amid marvels which bless us with air, water, sunlight, and every gradation of beauty.
Forest Floor
Carpet-maker
Journeyman
Apprenticed to
Perfection.
Vying to provide
Some reply
He first lays down
Warp and weft
Of richest brown.
Then with knots
Flat and round
He ties
Yarns died
Green so deep
It borders black
To nap
A dappled
Background.
For texture
He selects
A fairer shade
Of skein
And cuts
Tufts
So the piled patterns
Rise above
The lap
Of tapestry.
Finally,
Embroidery:
White snowdrops
Done in silken thread
Bow their heads,
While in a bed
Of buds
A crocus opens.
Works like those
Arose
In newly-settled cities:
Sardis,
Parsa,
Ecbatana.
Bereft of nature
Which they left
To live
In palaces,
Princes called
For images
To ease their grieving souls.
And so the carpet-maker did
As he was bid
But in his heart
He wove a prayer.
For what other
Offering
Can answer
Such beauty
But beauty?
No Noah This Time
The ark
Is lodged
At the top of a tree
That’s gripped to a rock on Ararat.
For it’s the living who cling
With a clasp so fast
No power can part it
To the last scrap
Of solid ground.
But only the dead can be reborn.
How bold
To release that grasp
And be,
Undone,
Torn out to sea
As the water recedes in a rush.
It leaves the land clean.
Every pebble is scrubbed,
The soil is stripped
To sifted and scoured sand.
The roots of grass are arrayed in rows.
The earth is a polished bone.
Away, below,
Ocean roils
With a flux of fish.
They flowed,
Rode the flood.
And so, the hold of the boat
That’s hung to this rood is empty.
For it’s they, not us,
Whose glistening seed
Contains the coming creation.
Hieroglyphs
My face is a parchment
Written over with verses
That flow
Like timid rivulets
Seeking the sea,
Or like wrinkles
Sketched on skin.
They are the passageways
Of those who keep the faith.
Graceful braids
That chase the rim
Of a rainwater pond,
Then veer to avoid a boulder,
Are traced by deer
Through now-dry grass.
In the fine-grained mud
By the bank
A crowd of cloven hooves and
Paws with claws
Have stamped staccato stanzas.
The river,
An epic all its own,
Raises tender ripples
That cling like echoes
To a swimming otter.
Suddenly,
Exclamation point:
Flyaway feathers and
Long thin bones.
A waterbird has come to grief.
Such stories
Are scratched in silent sentences
Across my wide brow.
If you could but
Read the script.
Winter III
You walk on water
You, Wind,
On me,
Raising wrinkles
On my seething skin,
For a molten moment molding me
Invisibly.
And, when the winter holds me fast
You leave footprints where you pass
Jagged flowers
Etched in glass.
Carnivores
It struggles,
buzzing.
We grapple.
But I have it
Outmatched.
We’re wedged
In a crevasse.
I adjust,
Thrust,
My stinger.
At length,
It loosens its grasp
On life,
And I can lift off
With the cargo.
I, wasp,
Build paper houses,
Sleep amid
The delicate sheaves.
I feed on the nectar
Flowers distill from the rain.
But my children need meat.
We have no place
In a world
Without blossoms
And beasts,
Both.
May I Be Your Sacrifice
That ill-stepped wing
Juts at a disjoint angle.
Wounded, air-limping,
She splashes along:
A stone skipped skew,
Threshing spume
Where she slaps
The obsidian sheen
Of the tree-vaulted lagoon –
Its stillness now
Memory, rent.
Behind her float
Downy motes of cattail lint
Bobbing in her bumpy wake.
Wait. Where?
Were they snatched, perhaps,
In the beak of a snapper?
Or wafted aloft on a wayward draft?
Nope. Neither.
Deftly they obeyed their mother’s
Urgent order – how conveyed? –
And dove for cover.
While she, bright-helmed wood duck,
Defeats you with that old battle stratagem:
Deceit.
Take Power
Will you fight them
On their grounds in their words?
You will lose
And lose
And lose
Lose, lose
Fight elsehow.
Fight with the cry of the osprey,
The stillness of the bittern –
The small one, stalking.
Bring the patience of the ancient
Birch, who spreads her body and papery skin
As table and cloth for the possum
Eating sweet paw paws
And leaving a trail of seeds.
Fight with the grasses’ red tresses,
The fragile fireworks
Of the tiny flower:
The star of the heaths.
Bring to the fight the flavor of raspberries,
Glistening jewels, clasped in their crowns of thorns.
Bow your thorniness down
And reach for the ground
In limp surrender
And root yourself there,
As Raspberry does,
And, so anchored, grow strong.
Fight with the snake’s silken passage
Out and back in
Through the holes the woodpecker made
In the loftiest pine.
She leaves her skin behind.
A stitch
In time
And pours up that pillar
And along the beams of the world.
Fight with the yellow and grey
Of the towering clouds before rain.
Make of your thigh-bone
A flute
And sound a note
That shatters the gold-
Plated walls of their blasphemous temple,
Their Jericho.