Algonquin Anthology
Karla Linn Merrifield
I am a Sisyphus, but my fate?
The turning over of rocks to look for poems,
an eternal labor in Algonquin Provincial Park.
Hardscrabble country of granite
forests, mountains, rivers, lakes—rocks everywhere
to roll. One after another, I bare their damp side,
one by one, find no two alike.
Beneath: each stone’s poem.
Under one: a sonnet of writhing nematodes.
Under another: tunnels of moles – their villanelles.
Under smallest rocks, easy to budge: red beetle haiku.
Under boulders almost too huge to shoulder away:
the lost epics of fungi, slugs and grubs.
Under those I nudge up with my left foot:
the Iliad of earthworms, the Odyssey of microbiota.
Give me long enough—I’ve got ’til the end of time—
and I’ll surely overturn tanka, sijo, renga,
the abecedarians of ants, and
the ghazals of black-fly eggs.
Just around the bend at the mouth of Beaver Pond?
I roll a new poem into being,
its stanzas snared in spider webs.
The turning over of rocks to look for poems,
an eternal labor in Algonquin Provincial Park.
Hardscrabble country of granite
forests, mountains, rivers, lakes—rocks everywhere
to roll. One after another, I bare their damp side,
one by one, find no two alike.
Beneath: each stone’s poem.
Under one: a sonnet of writhing nematodes.
Under another: tunnels of moles – their villanelles.
Under smallest rocks, easy to budge: red beetle haiku.
Under boulders almost too huge to shoulder away:
the lost epics of fungi, slugs and grubs.
Under those I nudge up with my left foot:
the Iliad of earthworms, the Odyssey of microbiota.
Give me long enough—I’ve got ’til the end of time—
and I’ll surely overturn tanka, sijo, renga,
the abecedarians of ants, and
the ghazals of black-fly eggs.
Just around the bend at the mouth of Beaver Pond?
I roll a new poem into being,
its stanzas snared in spider webs.
Listen to Karla read the poem here:
Working notes
When I was a little girl I wanted to grow up to be a biologist, enjoyed hours in my basement make-shift “lab” with a dissecting kit and an earthworm, a frog. That was until I discovered poetry. But, as a plein air poet, the natural sciences remain a great passion and come to the fore in poems like “Algonquin Anthology,” which I wrote with the great entomologist E.O. Wilson in mind. And, like many, many of my poems, this one was drafted on the scene in the company of many of those creatures in the lines.
About the author
A seven-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had some 400 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has ten books to her credit, the newest of which are Lithic Scatter and Other Poems (Mercury Heartlink) and Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems (FootHills Publishing). Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills) received the 2009 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she recently received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber - The Contemporary West in 2012. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com), a member of the board of directors of TallGrass Writers Guild and Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.