Mary McCoy
Environment Artist & Writer
from Orion Magazine
Place Where You Live
Indiantown Farm near Centreville, Maryland
The morning dewdrops on a thousand spiderwebs hung in the meadow and the river like glass, fog obliterating its far shore. It’s a salt-tanged river that winds into the Chesapeake Bay. It flows by our house which is my grandmother’s house, built on a shell midden left by centuries of indigenous people come to gather oysters in summer to eat and to smoke for the months ahead.
In my own childhood summers, I learned to swim off the old steamboat wharf that stretches out to deep water, deep enough for a keeled sailboat to tie up. Uncles helped us aboard and handed picnic baskets across. Strapped into orange life preservers, our trio of cousins, Harry, Gray, and I, would perch on the bow to squeal and hold on for dear life when the sloop heeled and spray flew all about us. Then come evening, back on land but feeling the boat still rocking, back in our many-windowed house, Grandma, all comfort and love, would come with a steaming platter of sweet corn picked that very day right here on our own farm.
For three and a half centuries, my family lived here. The ancestors came on ships and cleared the forest, along with the native people, who went off to subsist somehow in marshy places. We still find their arrowheads and shards of corncob-printed pottery and hence our farm is called “Indiantown.” The ancestors built a fine brick house, that is, no doubt, their slaves did, and at first with slaves, then with day laborers, they planted and harvested and worried their way through the hazards of British rule, the Civil War, droughts, and the great peach blight, just as we worry now about Roundup-ready crops, sea level rise, and ever-hotter summers.
On long walks with my cousins, we find flurries of bees and butterflies around the blossoming milkweed in June and sweetgum saplings flaring scarlet in late October. But in winter, I walk alone through snow-dusted corn stubble and watch as a fox streaks away then stops and turns to pierce me through with its fire-bright eyes.
from Symbiosis
Montpelier Arts Center
art and poetry exhibit with
Marilyn Banner
Symbiosis
Stone nibbler,
stone eater,
most intimate lover of stone,
lichen is the first
to grow.
A tiny kiss,
then fond embrace,
it spreads on naked stone,
digests its minerals,
sips the sunlight
that warms the rock
that is its home.
Stone eater
readies the rudiments
of nutrition,
freezing
and thawing,
splintering flakes of rock,
catching water and dust and silt,
the first grains of soil,
crumbs of stone
mixing with lichen’s own remains,
a profound stew
for birthing life.
Inseparable fungi and algae,
exemplars of collaboration,
lichen turn microscopic harmony
into fecund fruitfulness
before our very eyes.
from Gargoyle
Shelter
I have a small blanket
handwoven in warm brown plaid in the Shetland Islands
where the cold wind never ceases,
handed down from my great aunt
who could still turn cartwheels when she was sixty
and didn’t drink but died of cirrhosis of the liver.
I draw it round me now
for shelter,
for comfort.
It’s not really cold.
It’s spring.
But the wind blows too hard
and the numbers in the news climb too fast.
Too much news.
Too much disruption.
from Bay to Ocean Journal 2021
It’s a serious business
loving the water so much,
tracking the tides,
wading the beach,
dipping the paddle,
raising the sail.
It’s a serious business
loving the water
that calls to our hearts,
that eats up the shoreline,
that seeps up the edges of the green lawn,
that sashays its way closer and closer
toward our many-windowed house.
And each sunny afternoon,
the water tosses such pretty gifts,
reflections dancing in many-patterned brilliance
across the ceiling of the dear old living room.
And how long will it be
until the water, teasing up the red brick steps
and through the welcoming front door,
comes like a lover to claim its own?
from Bay to Ocean Journal 2021
Rising Water
I wander into the woods
and find the marsh coming out to meet me.
Must it be one or the other?
Creeping under the trees,
stealing in with a fecund mucky reek,
it meets me
with viscous mud where solid ground should be.
I wander under the trees
and through the winter-pale phragmites,
boots squelching in the coffee-black ooze,
and I follow a slender deer path printed with twinned clefts,
into a horizontal confusion of tall trees’ trunks
scattered across the spongy ground,
as if great giants had left a game of pickup sticks.
A decade ago, they wore a heron rookery in their branches,
but now they require me to be lithe,
to zigzag and clamber and climb
till I freeze for a moment
caught by the biting eyes of a fox beyond a waist-high fallen log,
icy accusation of trespass,
icy allegation of blame.
Then she’s gone,
leaving a hover of red amid the chaos of spring green and dead wood
before I can tell her I’m losing my home, too.
from Iceland
Time’s Story
Slice soul open and find no fiery core
only darkness brimful of light,
mystery of unity, ache of love,
ache of time gone and gone.
What mother was there?
What father?
What kin to fill the heart and sing
together
a song of no sound, all sound?
Ache and sorrow,
joy of breath,
hold me close and set me free,
embrace and empty
far from phenomena and familiarity.
I ache for touch and sweet sensation.
Rock like razors,
layer on layer,
rock like downy pillows,
egg and seed of revelation.
Speak not a word
but envelope me in your secret everlasting song.
Time and substance lost and found
in crystal wave
and sunlight too clear to look upon.
Save me from ecstasy
but give it to me, too.
from The Turning Year
Roundup Ready
A sweeping pass of spray
and a hundred thousand hopeful seedlings
perish from the intricate interacting exchange
of slow decay, nematodes and nurtured soil.
Reduced labor, surety of yield.
Sweet soil,
earth,
mystery where carbon sleeps
and life awakens,
you are holy bread.
Denuded, starved, what can you now sustain?
Swift baptism of chemical mist
insinuated into every acre,
in air and plant and animal,
in water,
and our vulnerable human cells.
from Here/Not Here, Art and Poetry of Place
Salisbury University Art Galleries
Late August
and the heat has settled on the tired land
and the corn is tall and thinking about turning brown
and the old house is peeling paint
that won’t ever be scraped and sanded
and painted over fresh again.
The heavy air speaks thunderstorms
and worse.
The vine-heavy trees at the shoreline
edging the wide flat field
are already leaning,
branches strained,
roots eroded
by the rising water.
Another hurricane breeds
down south,
the bay broods in anticipation.
The waves overreached the dock last time.
It’s hotter now,
and the tide rides higher up its pilings.
We’re already on the brink.