Elizabeth Mclagan
selected poems
elizabeth mclagan
In Hard Times
I Think About
Geology
For years no one could explain how a granite rock
could lodge itself on a basalt ledge in Oregon,
geology rejecting the theory of catastrophe
as a shaping event (think biblical tales of a flood);
everything happened gradually, they argued,
until the evidence piled up against them.
Catastrophe, catastrophe. You don’t have to believe
in one god or many or anything except the earth’s
inexorable record: end of the ice age, a lake in Montana
dammed by a finger of ice until it suddenly gave way
and sent water, mud, and ice-bound rock, a great
brown snake uncoiling and charging forward, flowing south
and then west, shearing off mountains, making waterfalls
of streams until it turned again into a swarm of backwater,
the ice finally melting, the rock stranded. Erratic.
Devastation everywhere. Tribes, villages, families,
lost or scattered. Not just once, but repeated.
Some narrative. But isn’t disaster always stalking us?
In France in the 19th century for a time it was the fashionable thing
to paint: wild storms, unimaginable wreckage, something
to make the good people shiver in their boots.
Or the real horrors of war bearing its flotsam
onto the fragile shores of a poem. Sometime in New York,
go to MOMA, where, if you are lucky, you might see
Chaim Soutine’s The Old Mill c. 1922-23.
Trees are losing their moorages, the roads are slideways,
a house is about to tumble into the emptiness
on the other side of a ridge, while the mill and its
cluster of houses is deforming and heading straight
for you. Sometimes I find myself sitting on that rock,
imagining someone back from a hunt or seasonal round
cresting the ridge to look down into an utter ruin.
Please not a single person, alone. Or I think
of Soutine, desperately poor, Jewish in Paris.
Was he moved by an earthquake somewhere?
Or was this his interior landscape, his thoughts
in a skitter from hunger too cold to fear, his brush
erratic, until he gave in to it, until it became his art.
elizabeth mclagan
After the
Eagle Creek
Fire, 2017
Despite the ash and the blackened slopes,
the eloquent haze of destruction and all
the temporal endings, even the mousetrap
of the infinite lurking like a secret tattered lung,
here is balsam of cottonwood, blackened branches
in drifts, the shadowed texture of evergreens,
a commune of darkness still standing, still
descending in shaggy rows from raw ledges.
The blue sky’s almost bearable, and below me
a river westering, the Columbia, water
where once was fire, lava poured and sealed
into columns, then ice, then in long ages
of rain something swerved open. I could have been
taken by a cataclysmic flood, in a moment
panicked and choked, a small forever before the river
took me into its watery haste. I could have been
on the summit of something. I look for the trace
of deer prints in ash, and ease my body down,
the moments elastic with small things buzzing,
the lichened cities, the rocks, loosened and crumbling.
Elizabeth McLagan is the author of the poetry collections In The White Room (2013) and My Rothko, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Terrain, The Southern Review, Boulevard, L.A. Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has won an AWP Intro award, the Frances Locke Memorial Award, and the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award.