by Rebecca Weil
If you were clay, you could sleep right here between the roots of the trees
at the top of the hill, where the turtles come to lay their eggs.
You could be vessels holding water. You could hold the banks of the streams.
If you were an apple tree, wild on the hill,
you could hang your last fermenting bodies
high in the cold air for anyone to dine on, to spread your seed.
If you were a stream, you could laugh over all the rocks
and bubble around the corners – create a home for salamander,
trout, and caddis fly. You could quench a multitude of thirsts.
If you were a coyote, you could crisscross the junctions
of trails and mark them with your pithy scat full of beetles, berry seed and apple skins.
You could yip in the night with your family and run across pine needled forests.
If you were a porcupine, you could crawl into a hollow tree
for the winter, with a bountiful cairn of dung at the door, unconcerned with the look. On warm
days, you could trough your belly out and back through the snow, with your waddling way and
tail swag. When needed, you could fan your quills with a rattle and show how strong you are.
If you were a hill, ah, if you were a hill, you could cup the blue-line stream in its early gathering
of water as it begins braiding its way to the bay and ocean. You could hold the chill morning
mist between your shoulders and call this home.
Rebecca Weil is the author of the award-winning book Bring Me the Ocean. Recent writing has been published in River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Journal of Wild Culture, and Phoebe, in which her piece “Old Friends,” was a finalist in the 2024 nonfiction contest. In addition, her poem, “Hair Thief: Kleptotrichy,” was a finalist in the 2023 Seneca Park Zoo Nature Poetry Contest for emerging poets. Weil is completing a collection of essays and poems tracing love, loss and solace found in connection with nature in Upstate New York.
Emerge Literary Journal 