Anne Marie Macari

Earth Elegy

By the time it fell, the tree was already part rot,
eaten by termites and ants,

stained with rain and urine, colonized. For years
I watched from my kitchen

as it ungathered in leaves and needles,

bleached, dissolving, though I hardly noticed
how the slow orgy

of weather took it season after season
into the pelvic

trench of dirt, and I got used to seeing it
behind the house, pointing

down the hill like a giant's fibrous arm
soft with fungus.

We'd kick it to see the wood crumble, see
the insects, horrible kinds,

writhe out of its cracks. And once I read that our air
is full of life we can't see

and thought of the sky falling with the falling tree,

and disintegrating with the tree, a company
of beings, billions,

dying as we were dying and other beings driving
through the debris

and living off it--the dining and dead together,
unseen, spinning and tilted

like us on our axis, pitched toward some
ever-place

of crashing trees, ravenous creatures,
the dirt lit

with their living-dying backbones.

Praying Mantis

The praying mantis rests on
my green towel near
the open window, each distinct part
like a child's wooden toy.

My son carries it to the sill overlooking
the yard. The mantis moves gently
like a creature in love,
though I have seen one devour

a grasshopper slowly--grasshopper
half in, half out, of its mouth--
stick arms lifted up
to its mandibles. Maybe grace

is that we do without hatred.
Grace doesn't need us.
It is silent as the mantis, head bowed
and mouth moving as if

it wanted for nothing as it waits
to impale an insect--
even a hummingbird--with the spines
of its forelegs. The first chill

of September settles around
the house, which for this moment
is the house grace made, in which
for this moment we have

no hatred for each other, only
a constant hunger
that is our way of moving
through the world. O mantis,

Christ child. Your six legs
a cradle: inside
your long thorax,
your abdomen, rocking.

---

Anne Marie Macari's second book, Gloryland, was published in 2005 by Alice James Books. Her first book, Ivory Cradle, won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly. In 2005 she won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine. Macari teaches at the New England College low-residency MFA program. contents | previous