Mother, I’m here with your painted copy of a Cezanne still life
that hangs over the dry sink you bought
with my father years before
I was born.

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Begin with light slathering the eel grass
and the horizon, a wide what-if.

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I’d found a young screech owl on the sidewalk a block from my house, its talons sunk, in death, in the nape of a rabbit kit.

CLICK HERE to watch me reading my persona poem, ‘”Moss Muse,” at the opening reception of the Breath and Matterexhibit at Boston Sculptors Gallery, July 18, 2018.

MOSS MUSE

We slid
from inland ponds
and algal strands
once ozone
made it safe
to make our way
to land. But we’re not
primitive, just down
to earth, growing right
under your feet
in girths,
clumps,
fronds,
tufts,
and sheets.

Wise and sly,
we are discrete.
Looking meek,
we crawl
and creep
in the boundary layers,
trapping heat
and water vapor.

And while we’re small,
that’s not all:
we’ve a genius
for filling
the emptiness—
snatching
a scant gap,
spreading
between cracks.

We can haul ourselves
up a wall
with no falderal,
and still leave our mark
on logs, stumps, and bark.

For a lark, some of us
park on the backs
of beetles, wheedling rides.

Everyone stomps
on our backs,
which helps
our rhizoids
latch and attach.

We’ve no need
for seeds or roots,
flowers or fruit.
We adore
opening
our pores,
throwing
our spores
to the wind,
finding rapport
in the shadiest
out-of-the way.

Our sex is
complex:
some sperm
swim to eggs
on a single
splash of water—
but some are
too slow
or get stalled
by the wall
of a water droplet.
So we’ve devised
more ways
to multiply.

Some of us are
celibate, propagate
by cloning
body parts—
bulbils,
brood bodies,
and branchlets
that detatch,
disperse,
immersed
in new habitats.

We have our pets, too,
never neglecting
the welter
of invisible fauna
to whom we give
food and shelter—
sharing our lairs
with cuddly water bears,
a load of rotifers,
springtails
with thin tails,
flowing nematodes,
the delightful mite.

Here’s our secret
to doing without
in times of drought:
dried up and shriveled
we’re not dead,
but dormant.
And before
we shut down,
our genes
will have written
precise
genetic
instructions
for our resurrection.

For we know
the ways of rain,
the art of waiting—
100 years if we must—
unflustered, gathering
dust, packed
tightly together,
holding onto each other,
until water,
our goddess—
bestows just one drop:
in only seconds,
we reckon,
we revive,
photosynthesize,
thriving
on proteins,
restored to life
and to luster,
parading
once more
in the shade,
our stock and trade,
sipping dew,
and rising anew.

— Wendy Drexler, 2018

Here’s a poem that I’m proud to have published in J Journal, which is affiliated with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY.

PROBABILITY THEORY

I’ve been trying to get dressed

in time to take out the recycle bins

but my daughter’s just called

from New York to FaceTime

with my granddaughter

so I’ll definitely let the tins

of cat food sweat it out

with the plastic milk

and humus containers

in their bin on the back porch

just before she called

a climate scientist said on the radio

we have probably 100 years

to prevent total climate catastrophe

and if we had the technology of 100 years ago

with the 7 billion of us alive today

we’d for sure be goners

though if we had the population

of 100 years ago and today’s technology

we’d sail right through

but there’s almost a 50/50 chance

given today’s population

whether today’s technology

can actually save us that’s only

a few generations away

and my granddaughter has no idea

what kind of world she’s been born into

and I don’t want to miss a single glimpse

of her happily stacking and snapping

the interlocking parts of her

Duplo blocks together even though

they’re cheap LEGO® knockoffs

that came in a huge zippered plastic bag

from TJ Maxx by way of China

and there’s probably better than

a 50/50 chance they don’t work

as well as the real thing

Here’s a poem for the waning days of 2017. “Closing the Loop on the Year” first appeared in The Hudson Review. At this time of year, I buy a new desk calendar, even though I now keep a digital calendar as well, and I transfer with colored markers all the birthdays of family members and friends from last year’s calendar to the new one, adding notes for concerts, doctor’s appointments, poetry readings, the dates taxes are due.

CLOSING THE LOOP ON THE YEAR

Snow clings to shingles. I riffle December
pages of my calendar—coffee-stained days,
bills paid, to-dos and past dues,
the late tracery of time spent, nearly
forgotten. I peel
the cellophane from the new calendar, turn
the blank pages. I want another year, oh yes.
And another after that. I want
tenacity like the dogwood outside my window,
preparing to stay, bare branches huddled hard
against the side of the house—
the one shoot that races straight up
from the middle of the crown—
brown umbel with its parasol of stalks,
each stalk capped with a pink bud
ready to be struck into white stars,
on whose account, by May,
the whole branch will tremble.

I’ve been fascinated with the idea that our ancestors may have been healthier and happier as hunter gatherers than as farmers. In Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens, he makes a good argument for this.

FIRST FARMERS

and everything / Was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need.

—Virgil

It took centuries to domesticate the wild
goat, grow almonds and olives from seed,
harvest barley with stone sickles.

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