I will paint myself back into the landscape:
snow-caked pines and a whited-out pond
waving slender arches of rimed dried reeds
in the glittering glade. I am disappearing into
the foreground as one of the two white herons,
folded wings traced by translucent ink,
feet long and thin, blending into bare bushes
of willows. When a knub of my joint twitches,
it’s the eager stirring of a bud in its dream
for March. When my claws shift their roots,
an eyeball finds itself shaking sheer and clear,
demisting the dazzling truth of trees walking.
I want the light above me to be the palest ink,
clouds and sunbursts as weightless as flakes
that never fall. I know there are unpainted
fish under opaque ice. I will feed on them
when I wish, but need make no rush because
no boat, no net, no rod, no hut. The landscape
is so clean it seems scarcely real. When I paint
myself into it I’m not thinking of this earth
but an earlier world, another mode of being
in winter. Snow had a different texture there.
I erase my shadow to adumbrate the feel.
_
Lucie Chou is an ecopoet working in mainland China. Currently an undergraduate majoring in English language and literature, she is interested in the ecotone between ekphrasis and ecopoetics. Her work has appeared in the Entropy magazine, the Black Earth Institute Blog, Sky Island Journal, the Tiny Seed Journal website, and in the Plant Your Words Anthology published by Tiny Seed Press. A poem is forthcoming in from Tofu Ink Arts, both in print and online. She has published a debut collection of ecopoetry, Convivial Communiverse, with Atmosphere Press. She hikes, gardens, and studies works of natural history by Victorian writers with gusto.
© 2023, Lucie Chou
Halfway Down the Stairs 