A Trans Landscape Elegy

By Nathan Erwin

for L

i. Good morning, little Lithosphere.
Wake up, it’s a cool air slippage kind-of-day.                       Coriolis wind
deflects the god of AA meetings & rushes into the foyer
as you leave for school.
Your mother is still refusing to look at your body, to say your true names.

In the Chemung Valley, where she carried you to term, the wind comes westward,
falls on the rich-pastured earth, wraps the beeches and their loamy soil
with a woodland roar.
Brother, this is a silent holy war.                                          Your mother insists
you are just like her – in body, embodying, in topography, you must grow food
just like her – raise beds, raise bees, reduce runoff.                                 Wake up, all of you:
a fifteen-your-old boy who set his mother’s house on fire. She has you.

Unwind your breath.
Now she doesn’t.
She has you.         No, she doesn’t.

ii. Good twilight, little Lithosphere.
Wake our old, stoned father resting where the crust is the thickest,
his body has grown some thirty miles     deep.
Sigh in a high tenor,
Difference lets you see.   
See.
See.  Chanting again and again, so he hears you.
There are a number of things you are in need of
locked behind your bedroom door,           so head home.
Like a lost cartographer, orient your map to the landscape, line up
fir behind fir,
the storyline of early dark. Did you know even the Tundra Swan pushes its neck
toward human vestiges, toward shelter?

Get home. Find the room where it’s raining in the corner,
with the ritual scroll for birth:
shower in warm milk and herbs, wash your face in burning birchbark.
That’s how 
the fire starts,

just as Spring breaks open,
just as your mother walks in.