You come to tell me there is an ocean beneath the ground, a vastness I can’t see. Roots of bluestem, horsemint, and switchgrass: a forest of roots beneath the soil, touching and touching and touching. The reach of them, their spread and spiral, a continuous tunneling toward the center.
You come to tell me of this world; I can’t see it, but it is there. Each fine filament of root awake, breathing and beating and being.
You walk gently across the field of bluestem because you know: this twining and swirling beneath ground, the soles of your feet pressing down to meet roots which breathe, drink, and speak their soft unceasing language.
You walk barefoot over the sandy, porous earth, the lightness of it, and as you walk you sink a little, softening toward the web of roots. You walk inside the knowing of the grasses and the knowing carries you across and through the field and you are not separate from it, like the geese are not separate from the river when they float slowly across its surface and their webbed feet sink down and down and are held by the tea-colored water, held and homed.
You know both ways, you know across and over, in and down, and you want me to know both ways are true. You want me to breathe in and out knowing how one root touches the next and the next and nothing is really broken.
You want me to know there’s a singing without words and an ocean below the field, and it gleams and is true and whole, waiting for me to know it and be known by it. The ocean waits and waits in its patience, it waits while all the time it is saying, it is singing softly: now, now, now.
Notes:
I wrote this piece for and with 120 acres of farmland in northeastern Wisconsin, a place I’ve known my whole life, a place of restored prairie meadow, woods, wetlands, and cultivated fields bordering the Little Wolf River, the place in the world I’m most intimate with, the land that gave birth to me. In distress about its future, which is uncertain due to family conflict, I asked the ancestors of the land for help and guidance—and this is what appeared. The “you” of the piece is the ancestor who spoke to me. This piece is dedicated, with deep gratitude, to the ancestors, and to Cheryl Potts’ ancestral storytelling group for guidance, support, and encouragement in the original sense of the word: “to put heart in.”
About the Author
Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket. She lives on ancestral Lenape land in the mountains of New York State.
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