Poems by Marybeth Holleman
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by Marybeth Holleman
Born near the Cuyahoga River just before it caught fire, raised in the Great Smokies near the rolling waters of the Upper French Broad, Marybeth transplanted to Alaska’s Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound—just two years before the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill changed her life trajectory.
shards of ice splitting
from the glacier’s face
released from centuries
of hard labor. palpable
the relief, as sharp angles
shed to shining curves,
drips and puddles slip
into ocean, stream, lake.
purple clouds and the rain.
rounded rocks stippled
with lichens. alders and
willow wave. spruce crown
with eagle’s nest blooming
blue forget-me-nots.
cormorant dive for herring,
humpback calf rolling
with a pod of leaping porpoise.
lion’s mane jelly pulsing
over lemon-green popweed
and barnacled rock.
many hands grasping
big blue ferry’s railing,
steady across spacious
seas toward the city
where they wing to distant
homes. grassy shores
and blooming roses. fields
of wheat and rising dough.
amber glow of cut glass
windows sifting winter’s
snowsoft light. and I
upon this rocky headland
drinking glacier melt.
© Marybeth Holleman
Birch I
by Marybeth Holleman
Branches reach and then break
in winds and snows,
then rebuild and rebreak,
again and again:
transforming suffering to beauty,
one leaf at a time.
© Marybeth Holleman
Campbell Creek, August 5th
by Marybeth Holleman
From Canary Summer 2020
they are there when you stop
and watch clear water’s choreography
across multitude of patterned rock.
rippling length of crimson flashes
in pulsating current, thick as logs
but supple and swaying, the darker
tails waving side to side just enough
to stay in place. red swaths reveal
and disappear, one then another
then a line of five or more strung
like rubies light and dark shadow lilt
with one quick flick red rippling dissipates
then reappears against the shore
or limber in lines along a fallen tree. big
red muscles beating back up what as
fingerlings they each swept down now
the laboring push, the urgent
flame daubed dark swaying curves
tinged now late summer white tips
reminding mountains what will come.
five years of deep sea to return,
arrow-straight swim hundreds of ocean miles,
to this shallow stream fins slicing surface
frosted with their termination dust,
tails singing strong upcurrent as streaming
bodies pull them, fits and starts,
downriver, back to the orchestral sea.
© Marybeth Holleman
Dispatch from Siberia
by Marybeth Holleman
From Canary Spring 2024
They live and work along the northern edge of land
where ice touches down every fall, later and later now,
and not as far south, so that walrus—tens of thousands
of long-toothed soft brown bodies—have immigrated
farther north and now gather just outside
their towns, beach en masse and wait for the ice
which is later and later, so that these men,
with their wide stances and wider smiles, armed with nothing
but sticks and the sense that generations of northern living
have given them, pray to their spirits and protect those walrus,
at first from polar bears, moving in waves along the coast,
roaming wide in search of food, following scent of walrus
and then carried out on that ice, staying with ice as it
recedes so far that they have not come back, those bears,
to this shore, and are either drowned or starved or moved
to other shores, Canada or Greenland, where ice still stays near,
and now from curious townspeople and foreign tourists,
circling near and clicking cameras and causing stampedes
in which thousands, pups and their mothers, are trampled
to death, so these brave men, armed with nothing
but sticks and a belief in the world they inhabit, carry
the carcasses far from town, leave them to feed
passing polar bears, and the first year, over one hundred bears
came and ate every morsel, but since then, with the ice
carrying the bears away, the mound of carcasses remains
rotting on the tundra, on this northern shore
where these men, smiles as wide as ever, continue to believe.
© Marybeth Holleman
every rock
by Marybeth Holleman
From Canary Fall 2018
every rock remembers
the day I was born. remembers
the afternoon you learned
to walk. not even the slightest
wingbeat of a moth. as sunlight lifts
early morning dew escapes their
notice. they witness and regard all
life with the tenderness of
a grandparent gazing on the new:
eyes that see far beyond anything
words could convey and yet
yearn, regardless, for the happiness
of the child. I know this is so.
but I don’t know what rocks make of it.
my life, yours, they seem content
with how we’ve turned out
but when asked if we’re doing
what we were put here for, they are
silent. I press both palms hard against
their solid coolness, and all they say is,
do not think too much of your life.
then like an echo off granite cliffs
once covered in ice I hear,
do not think too much of all life.
it is a sweet interlude in the turbulence.
we will be missed.
© Marybeth Holleman
How to Grieve a Glacier
by Marybeth Holleman
From Canary Spring 2024
It’s not something you can hold in your arms.
You can’t rock with its image in a blanket
and keen away the nearing pain.
That white face is distant, and cold, unrelenting
in its forward grind to the sea,
stalwart even as it thins, crumbles, pulls back
into history and oblivion.
The sun itself finds nothing to love,
save soft rivulets of water its rays release
from eons of hard frozen luck.
But I tell you I do love this blue-white giant,
and grieve its leaving, even as I thrill to watch
thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas.
So we sit, you and I, scanning the newly revealed
and imagining what next will show itself,
what balded rock and bared shoreline,
as ice slips and pulls away in great chunks.
We know it is leaving, abandoning us
to what our kind has created,
and we know its gift of rarified water
will only bring more sorrow.
Yet it is a gorgeous deterioration.
Its glowing face turned toward
what the living cannot see.
© Marybeth Holleman
Refugium
after A.R. Ammons’ “Love Song”
by Marybeth Holleman
From Canary Spring 2021
At dusk, when the light
falls away from your slopes
and the line of your rippled ridge
sharpens against the golden
afterglow from the setting sun,
you with your halo don’t go,
watch over me as I lie upon
your soft treed arms and let
the cooling breeze of night
descend upon me, spent.
I climbed so long to get here,
to reach the ridgeline of your lips,
to fall to my knees in wonder
at all that lies at your feet, vast
in all directions. More than I can
hold in my arms, say with my
tongue, more, I want to stay
on your sturdy shoulders and wait
out the storm sure to come, the one
we have set upon ourselves with
our desire to have, to have, to have.
Let me remain here with you, large
and immoveable rock, mountain,
let you be my whole world.
© Marybeth Holleman
The Birds Make Everything Okay
November 13, Anchorage, Alaska
by Marybeth Holleman
From Canary Spring 2024
it is freezing rain and it is dark
and there should be snow but no
it’s not cold enough and the bears
are still awake and roaming our
neighborhood looking for food the
salmon and berries all gone and
the snowshoe hares have turned
white are bright against the brown
of climate change’s new order and
I think now of how many are gone
a quarter of them winged away from
us in just my lifetime disappeared.
but there are nuthatches at the suet
and one slips her beak into the ridges
of the gnarled willow, and there is
a steller’s jay winging in low from
spruce to snatch one last peanut,
and earlier I saw, scrabbling for grit
at the edge of a half-frozen puddle,
a downy woodpecker, bright red
crown nodding, yes, and he did not
fly off at my approach. he did not leave.
© Marybeth Holleman
Whales at Night
by Marybeth Holleman
From Canary Fall 2018
they come
after the day’s
fishing fleet
has gone to anchor
awaken us
with a sigh
that sounds human
but is whale-breath
the long exhale
after a deep dive
sprays dappling
concentric rings
left by their arcs
into air
on an otherwise
silent and glassy
sea
© Marybeth Holleman