Week 48: Susan O'Dell Underwood

God as John Muir Grieving Himself to Death over the
Government’s Plan to Dam Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite

                                                            Their arguments are curiously like those of the devil,
devised for the destruction of the first garden.
                                                                                                       —John Muir, 1912

He turns, doomed leviathan,
to the mouth of the Tuolumne, incipience of tides.
There’s no obedience now or reason or salvation.
The granite seems a jaw set in betrayal,
all night constellated enemies surrounding.
The flow shallows and loses its salt.

The largest suicides will
heartbreak every mystery with stench.

Muir turns his face not to the monoliths
but to memory of monoliths lit as if from within,
sunset domes ruddy as cheeks above his beard.
He would stand useless, a dumb giant
child in a corner, staggered by their crimes.
The cascades harp their elegies,
aeolian like phantom porcupine quills.
The meadows don’t know him.

A bird is all it takes to make him weep,
open-throated and tearing at the sky.
Every desolate twig a promise broken,
every wolf forlorn by the moon it loved,
every sunrise a portent of mountains burned.
He is the foxfire which will not glow at midnight.
He is the wounded keen slap of fish during drought.
He is the shimmer of granite, an impotent fist.
He is the last whisker of white fog. He is sorrel
struck by the first piss in the morning,
the madrone limbs red as crucifixion.
He is the last bud on the last lupine,
purpling its own death, a lost tongue.

Susan O'Dell Underwood directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University near Knoxville, Tennessee. Besides two chapbooks, she has one full-length collection, The Book of Awe (Iris, 2018). Her poems appear and are forthcoming in a variety of journals and anthologies, including: A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, and Oxford American.