Author’s Note: “Sweet gum” celebrates the remarkable sweet gum tree; it also praises—well, praise, which it sees as another face of rage and mourning; it sees rage as also a kind of praise, praise of what could be and isn’t. Some literature seems to suggest that to celebrate anything is to wallow in privilege and ignore all the world’s appalling misery, that misery and evil are inherently more real than joy. This poem doesn’t agree.
Sweet Gum
Liquidambar styraciflua
On the sandy track, a smashed squirrel boils
up fresh maggots when stirred with a hand,
refuse of the same old haste and waste,
while the bright October wind sifts down
sweet gum leaves over gray fur and crushed
flesh, reminding the springing squirrel-
mind that black gum leaves turn red, and sweet-
gum leaves—hanging among their caltrop-
seeds—turn purply-black; but that’s naming
for you in a life where we learn late
or not at all, and at least sweet gum
smells sweet, amber-sap native of a new
world which was always the same old world:
bite the sandy stem of a fallen
star-shaped leaf and you’ll catch myrrh-resin,
breathe up incense, even as you feel
its grit grate in your teeth and must spit
and spit. The same old world’s awash
in those telling the same old story:
the one where meat sliding into maws
of ivory worms is always more
real than the life that carried it here
on five-clawed feet, death never less than
appalling, the grit always harsher
than the sassafras-tang of the sap
is bright; where joy is so bourgeois
that they’re ashamed to own the fine
of these few minutes standing on sand
beside the dead, to gnaw the gritty
stem of a leaf whose life has sunk back
into its tree. But today, strangely,
you remember that in this sudden
second, you can pause, you don’t always
have to collude while that same old
story eats all the other stories;
that this wringing place has many names;
that another face of all the rage
and grief is praise. As these maggots praise,
curling like ecstatic toes in their first
first feast, refusing to waste anything.
As this gum tree praises, releasing
deep-purple five-pointed stars into
the shining morning, alligator-
barked being whose first name is sweet.
⧫
Catherine Carter, raised on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, now lives with her husband in Cullowhee, NC, near Western Carolina University, where she is a professor in the English education program. Her most recent full-length collection is Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press, 2019). In addition to the Delmarva Review, her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, Ashville Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, among others. On a good day, she says she can re-queen a hive of honeybees and roll a whitewater kayak. On less good days, she collects stings, rockburn, and multiple contusions. Website: https://catherinecarterpoetry.com
Over its 15-year history, Delmarva Review has published new literary poetry and prose by over 500 authors from 42 states, the District of Columbia, and 16 foreign countries. Almost half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Both print and digital editions are available from Amazon and other major online booksellers. The print edition is also available from regional specialty bookstores. Website: https://delmarvareview.org/
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