by Rebecca Foust
Tebot Bach Publishing
P. O. Box 7887, Huntington Beach, CA 92615-7887
www.tebotbach.org
ISBN-13 978-1-893670-47-1
2010, 104 pp., $20.00

Maybe it is because I write, that I am still attached to books—not Kindle editions or eBooks, but tangible spines and pages. Maybe it is the sensuality of a book: how when reading while smoking the book remembers whether it was double or triple ligero; it lingers even days after its gone from your undershirt. Or, maybe it has to do with the same reason I prefer CDs to mp3s: thumbing through jewel cases to ogle art work and pictures, knowing that they, too, have something to say along with the music.

I received two books of poetry the same day. I skimmed both immediately, but picked up to read Rebecca Foust’s God, Seed first. The book is handsome. The cover, with its striking dandelion ball and faux cloth binding, its cardstock-thick, coated pages adorned with full color original art (created by Lorna Stevens) and the book’s non-standard, ample size all speak to something indulgent, even if its pages are not yet perfumed with tobacco but should be, like some after-event cigarette.

Indeed, God, Seed is sensual. Take for instance the lines from the poem, Lakemont Park: “…then I’d arc/and release again and again. Your hands,/your tongue, the cricket-sung, grass-sweet dark.” I picture my twelfth grade English professor climbing over his podium with “oohs” and “aahs” and a weirdly contorted face of rapture upon reading this, and the classroom, for the first time, grasping his ecstasy at the hands of poetry—not creepy at all this time, not when we are all taken to the same place by it. Recently, I heard cinematographer, Louie Schwartzberg, say, “Beauty and seduction are Nature’s tools for survival, because we will protect what we love. Their relationship is a love story…”* The book’s subtitle is Poetry & Art About the Natural World. Perhaps the sensuality I find in holding this book—pawing and gawking at it—is intentional; poet, Rebecca Foust, and artist, Lorna Stevens, have collectively created an aphrodisiac meant to entice me—meant to prompt me to lust—that I might safeguard what to them is most dear—and a love story.

God, Seed is in three untitled parts. In part one there are bright things: red-bellied crickets, green apples, poppies and persimmons. In part two there are fossils, black cormorants, silhouettes, crosshairs and crosses. In part three: seeds, circles, bright things again and sprouts growing and green.

Foust’s poems in part one are intimate moments as fleeting as green—plucked from time—some sweet and others orgasmic. They each possess an infusion of Foust’s love for nature. It is not a love distilled to any one of the Greek words: storge, philia, eros or agape. It cannot be reduced to any one of them, rather it is all of them, collective, wrapped up “compact, jampacked with seeds/each udder-taut universe/encased in what shapes/[even] a raindrop.” There is the simple but affectionate moment in Mount Ellinor Hike:

The extra gear you made me bring
which I disdained but quickly
layered on when we summited

in a whiteout blizzard. On descent,
the dislodged rock ricocheting
down down down

just past my head. Above on
the ridge the goat with her kid,
chewing a meditative cud.

And the sensual in A Question:

Was pleasure
ever given
more succulent flesh
than in this first bite
of sun-ripened tomato,
Brandywine, Cherokee
or yellow cherry, picked
warm from the vine…

There is something of adoration stumbling across a Sonoma Oak Tree,

Knee-deep in owl clover,
wild mustard, white
firework wildflower.
…
Galleon-girth trunk
twisted back—a god
caught surprised.

And the unapologetically erotic in Cherries:

She sucks the stones
to bare bone, then spits.

Her feet are bare
and stained red,
her lips
are stained red,
her lips are jammed up
next to his thighs
so close she can just
barely part them.
Like this. And this,
like an eyelash kiss,
oh like this.

But it is also unconditional—not reserved only for the youthfulness of spring or lavishness of summer fruit. It is a bliss to be had in all seasons. From Persimmons:

while the mature persimmon,
even wrinkled, even withered, even sunk
to deliquescence of melt
is luscious flesh, youth
only a green trace bitterness
on the roof of a mouth otherwise palated
with rich river pudding, plush and pulp,
soft-slide swallow delight
and sweet, sweet.

Foust writes over and over about luscious fruit—her analogue for nature—the kind that “cedar waxwings get drunk on, and sing;” (October) “a red-wine-distilled light” (Pomegranate) that neither Persephone, nor I can much resist—its love, or its song.

In part two, there is a shift to the elegiac. Having been enchanted by the beautiful and seductive, we are now exposed to the villainous peril, which threatens this love story: “The sun/already in decline has turned the lake red. It’s already starting to burn.” (The Cormorant) In the world of the poet, so intense, the greatest risk is diminishment. Take the opening poem of part two, Unheard:

…an extinction of—

a plenary erasure. Of
their bones are fossils
made, flesh
and blood seen
no more by my child’s
child,
nor touched,
nor heard,
nor even heard of.

Or as she says in Secondary Poison,

Mice eat d-CON
stored in the shed
by someone

a decade ago
and don’t die
right away,

but weaken…

In these poems, Foust is lyrically dower, but she treats even death, unsettling as it is, with goggles still fringed with the beautiful and eyes “still glittering green” (Secondary Poison); perhaps it is the residual trace of the world she recalls from part one, or perhaps, it is because she is a poet and not a technologist as she describes them in Last Bison Gone:

…We love what we love
in the scientific way, efficient, empiric,
vicious, too much

and always we touch it, our breath
blooming algae on the walls of Lascaux,
shimmering in acid-etch green.

We must see “otherwise,” she says in the poem After; we must see, she says, in Nuclear. And not only the gods of science to whom we now “kneel, pray” and celebrate for their gifts of security, yield and windfall profits. Who is the villain? Oftenest in love stories one is jilted and the other is the villain. The villain is us disenchanted and now blind who (Nuclear)

Yet blind with fury and not knowing what
Lives will be uncreated, not knowing what
It is that we are doing, we keep going.
We keep going not knowing, not knowing…

Foust walks a fine line for the most part opening eyes without coming off as overtly preachy with two small exceptions, Bee Fugue and Herculaneum. What she does so well in the bulk of the poems is present a heart and a kaleidoscope to see the otherwise even in the midst of apocalyptic horror as in After:

the trees were curded along
each branch,

the rubble confectioned,
sculpted

and stiff-peaked like beaten
meringue

But in the two poems mentioned, she offers up little else but delightful language. Don’t get me wrong, she excels at language. Who wouldn’t fall for the line “sweet mulch, sorrel/and sunlight” (A Question) or “the workers fan out in dawn beelines, mucking/chest-deep in pollen,/forcing French kisses from flowers…” (Bee Fugue), but in Bee Fugue and Herculaneum there is a sense of the empiric that she disdains: facts only, a list of sorts that deposits blooms of algae to decay what is the lost marvel of each. Perhaps in ruminating too long on the villain, she was somehow overcome for a moment by it. Though, this is a very small tick.

Receive is the first poem of part three. “You [are] not part of this picture,” it pronounces as its denouement. Seemingly bleak except that the rest of the poem describes a halcyon scene once more with “as many shades of green as places to look.” The spurned lover, once forsaken, now flourishing when released and recovered from the unhealthy relationship. Seeds is the next poem; it describes the life-cycle of a giant sequoia:

…cone-born, encased
in diamond-hard coats;
something secreted
encrypts them against
climate and time
lets them wait out
the cold-ground
generations of winters

…seeking meaning
from rain, memory
from pain…

There will be restoration even if there is no one to hear the tree fall, so to speak. The third poem, Uprising gives us, personally, more hope:

A visitation of vultures attended Dad’s
death, and Mom’s flashed a dark, distant
wing from somewhere above my heart,
beak-picked, grown cold with watching

her make good radiation fodder…

…Until many molts later
the pulse that beat on the monitor:
HereI’m hereHere I’m here

In the four-celled heart of my embryo son.
Then came the rifleshot, air-crack buckle
Of stone made flesh…

Maybe, it can all be reborn—the love story revitalized, us all reconciled—tenuous though it may seem. Camouflage provides a blueprint:

The baboons piss on the concrete poured just last week,
scratch the smooth walls

into soften and crumble, working long into the night. They will
not sleep, bellow, beat chest

or mate, or take any food until the etching is done—
template of tangled branch, trunk, and root,

template of template of memory, some stripe of sunrise
caught between branches, a monsoon-puddled

moon, orchids hung high in the tree canopy. They scrape
overhead until concrete passes for sky

in the wet season. Squat, piss, squat, piss again until the floor
smells grown, not laid…

But Foust offers no guarantees. Who could? Part three is one of vacillation and uncertainty—not in the resilience of Nature, but in our place within it and any expectations as to our own self-importance—of whether or not we will pursue our love once more and, more importantly, whether she will have us back. The only promise is that “when you’ve gone, it won’t matter to the musk rose/twining the old trellis over the eaves.” (Perennial) She continues:

…none of it matters. Not how you loved it, not
how you knelt in each dark December plot
to part the rich plait, reached

through the wither of winter to find something born
of the decay of all that was young once,
something still growing and green.

This is where Foust leaves us with our love inflamed (or reinvigorated) but, still, threatened and us earnest but with all our confidence shaken. It is a genuine beginning (perhaps an end) to a love story. Perhaps we were not even aware we were in one: enter Foust, enter Stevens, enter God, Seed—a treat, a well-crafted book, cohesive and convincing, beautiful and rousing, and full of tremor. At least this reader is smitten. It’s time for a smoke.

*Schwartzberg, Louie. Louie Schwartzberg: The hidden beauty of pollination. May 2011. TED. http://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_the_hidden_beauty_of_pollination.html. (16 May 2011).