The Trees Will Remain

Bell Ring Books

Description

The Trees Will Remain celebrates the vibrant industry of life within the rolling green hills of Lake County, Florida. The poems are full of orchids and orange groves and lush heat and longing. They speak to the underrepresented population of migrant workers whose lives parallel the residents in seasons of want and of plenty. The earth is fertile here, but it is also rife with relics and ghosts. There is a bomb shelter beneath the orchards, and hot houses of conjured exotics. There are coyotes and hurricanes and fruits that hang “like little taunts” at the memory of venturers who lost it all in the citrus industry. But there is also an unbroken spirit here—“I can almost touch the veins of her.” Connected beneath us all, is an ancient aquifer, “a current braiding in the hollows.”

Sorrento, Florida

@ Laura Sobbott Ross

…it drifts across the winter-tongued

pastures, nothing sweetly airborne,

just a simple rumpled purple.

—Phlox

Sample Poems

Lake County

A heightened green, the eased inclines,

an earth too damp to echo. Your words

are safe here, this horizon’s seamless—

horse, orchard, fence, palm tree; cumulus clouds

so close you’ll witness their sticky lint inflections.

Who knew stillness could be this porous,

this immune to the leaching pitch of cicada.

Bring apples for the horse. Along highway 441,

trucks haul oranges and sod past roadside stands

selling gator jerky and boiled peanuts. Strawberries

blister into being. Gopher turtles tunneling in and out.

You’ll find fossils in these hills, legacies of pioneers

and Timucua, of bootleggers and soldiers, farmers

and laborers. Ancient currents course beneath us

in the limestone aquifer. There are ghosts

in the groves, relics blown in by more than weather.

Did you hear about the man who lost half his house

to an eyewall wind, but a carton of eggs

on the kitchen counter remained unbroken?

There’s nothing fragile here beneath this green aura.

In nurseries, orchids so intricate, they seem to have been

plucked from beneath the skin, tweezered right out

of the blood. Don’t touch them with your bare fingers.

Each exquisite intrusion of stamen and sepal held up

to the light and inhaled back inside through the lungs—

pleural membranes, alveoli, follicle and inflorescence;

humid things that needs no roots, so little light to breathe.

(first published in december)

Sorrento, Florida

@ Laura Sobbott Ross

Those small horns that root up

and curl hard from your skull make me think

of restless gods, of siren songs and beer cans

tossed among the chickweed. Cloven sounds sacred.

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

I have a feeling they would give me anything—

bread, shoes, songs, forgiveness.

Instead, they bring me cactus flowers & orchids

from the nurseries where they work,

where they have grown hungry

for a language that is not their own.

There’s more to this than a state of being:

past, present, future. Tell me, what are your stories?

Angle is the Creole word for English, and medusa

is Spanish for jellyfish— an asterisk tipped

with electric barb that floats beneath the surface.

Were is a word that troubles them, and through

is an opening that’s hard to articulate.

I want to tell them about poets and revolutionaries

who rose from the same fields of lath and linen,

this scorch of citrus & nettle & yield. Mothers worry

about writing letters to their children’s teachers,

but dancing & food are universal. Papaya, sugar,

and water are all she needed, Carmela tells us,

sharing her homemade candy. On my desk, they leave

charms— roses and crucifixes woven from palmetto,

origami cranes with red margin lines in their wings.

Last night, I wondered how many people

were looking at the moon along with me,

writes Etienne in wide-eyed, schoolboy script.

These new words between us, a scaffold of threads

knotting the gridline of latitude to longitude,

the same hard rib of the equator. Who knew that Archangels

is a city on the White Sea, or that there are six thousand

phrasings for moon— mwezi, luno, mond, lor; huo guo*

is the round rim we venture across with wooden sticks

paired like quotation marks, dipping our offerings

into the same seasoned essence— exotic new mouthfuls:

mung bean, taro, lotus, bamboo shoot, am, is, are, because.

*huo guo is a Chinese fondu made with hot broth.

(first published in Southern Humanities Review

and winner of the 2017 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize)

Sorrento, Florida

@ Laura Sobbott Ross

Conjure, sisters,

they’ve been told, but don’t touch

the petals with your skin.

—Orchid Society

Mount Dora, Florida

@ Laura Sobbott Ross

The rest of us… hushed in quaffed awe

at the spectacle— this radiant antiquity

called faith.

—Festival of Guadalupe