Jennifer Davis Michael

Every Green and Growing Thing

for my father

I walk these woods and know that all around,
unseen, in rotted stumps and fallen trees,
is more life than I can imagine.
I know because you taught me how to look
before I stepped, to check behind each log.
When I was four, you killed a copperhead
we startled in the swamp. I won’t forget
how long its body twitched. (I wonder now
if you’d have let it live, without me there.)
You took me hunting for arrowheads carved
by those who walked before us in the woods.
I wanted every pointed rock to be one.
The understory becomes canopy,
I see now, looking up.

We touch only a fraction of what is.
Even your shrunken body underneath
my hands as you slipped slowly from this world
was not the whole of you. The words I spoke
—the psalms and poems read off a tiny screen
to populate your antiseptic room—
left epics unexpressed. Now, our conversation’s
unhooked from time and space:
a sweet discovery like phacelia
blossoming on the rocks. And you are here
in every green and growing thing,
in every step I take through this new world.

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her published work includes two poetry chapbooks, Let Me Let Go and Dubious Breath, as well as a scholarly monograph, Blake and the City. Her website is: jenniferdavismichael.com.