POETRY

Love Song in Someone Else’s Loblolly Stand

By Carson Colenbaugh     VOLUME 57 No. 2

Vertical Divider

It is all too straightforward: stuck in the timberfields
with technical gear; beleaguered by errant
unsellable riches, sparkleberry and smilax
and the like; surveying this product’s potential.

Just ten pines tucked in this sample plot, each twice
your age and about your girth. Just ten pines and not
one soft trunk more, but extend that sample tally
to the rest of the acreage. Now twenty pines, forty,

eighty, over two hundred, and the naked shade
that needles make in all this tedium easily
stretches it farther, out beyond the logging roads
back to you. Countless hours could we fill together

with all that cutting: wet shirt-stains and wood aplenty.
Imagine splints for fires come evening, fatwood
we could sell cheap at a roadside stall to purchase
spices and cheeses, figs and dark wine. Imagine

logs broad enough for us to build a little home,
and imagine that home, each of us bathing,
soaked in the aroma of terpenes, remembering
the grain we cut as it courses through our life.

                                   Pickens County, South Carolina

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CARSON COLENBAUGH is a poet and forest ecologist from Kennesaw, GA. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Terrain.org, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hollins Critic, and elsewhere. His ecological work has been published in Human Ecology. He is a 2024 Tor House Foundation Fellow and can be found on Instagram @carsoncolenbaugh.


VOLUME 57 No. 2