The following poems appear in Mark Irwin’s Once When Green (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry). They are reprinted here by permission of the poet and press. Learn more about Once When Green and purchase here.
Holiday Inn
When we checked into the hotel, I remembered how we’d been
intimate in the forest, and that love is not a fleeing into nature
but an opening, just like that attempt to get back to your
childhood room, door after door that can only lead to more trees
fuzzy with birds. The hotel was not crowded, but those bells
we heard were only the sporadic tumble of coins from a machine
vending drinks, not the vespers from that church in the mountains. We
did drive there the next day, sat in the wax-scented silence opening
the way moss will near a spring, or the slow-motion dead into our
minds. Yes, as though they are trying to reconceive, rekindle
the sparking seconds—cricket or sparrow chirp, laughter—while the house
sags in shadow, yet memory is an opening too, trying new riffs
to make things last, accessing then excessing the present briefly the way
rain does, its fecund scent summoning others, some from that childhood
room that you are approaching now, the desk drawer filled with green
acorns, the chert arrowhead, and the collection of buffalo nickels, year
by year, in the small blue folder, the buffalo out of bounds now,
the herd we saw on the way home below Spinney Mountain, twenty
or so by the fence, shaggy, their great heads snorting, tons of small
thunder, their hooves and horns, the lost root and roof of the land.
What if?
To become this iris waiting to be ungowned
as the warm spring breezes come. Now feelings
of arriving are confused with departing. You wish to leave
but have no place to go, for place is changing
everywhere. The forsythia’s sulfur-yellow boughs lit with twitching bees,
blackbirds nesting, chirping, flashing their chevrons through the hedgerows, and frogs
grunting among cattails in the marsh. Now you would like to become free enough
to fill the moments beginning to occur. Last night in sleep
the seeds you planted became small blue flames that grew taller. What
fruit might they bear? What if this life
is just the porch to something else? What if that bee slowed
by frost on the autumn sill is just waiting for the light
to become the exact length to open its body?
Less Vast Pastoral
If the question is about distance, the answer
is receding forests. If the question’s about time,
we are falling and risk having
only memory. Yes, we are moving forward, following
the sun but—as when driving the same roads—
remember the future. How to become explorers, cartographers
again. We are lapsed tellurians and that one cloud,
elbowing the mountain, reminds. Come,
the mountain says. Come inside. Its blunt steeple
resisting time. Its caves that enclose
the body. The hours know
the body, the years the mind. We breathe, and then
vanish. How to become
more? Blood, carbon, star, leaf. —To reach where the present
opens chance, and verbs sail, crisscrossing
through words, where the horns of those deer
taper into that mountain whose creeks are finding a river, a first
language, a home, a thirst for listening.
Et in Arcadia Ego
Once as a kid he’d buried a pet rabbit in that meadow,
now they’re building a new subdivision of twenty houses
but so far just the foundations have been poured so that from the hill
the site resembles a series of giant graves. —And once he ran
across that space, a kite tugging his arm. Age of the body, age of the land
where 150 million years ago brontosauruses roamed. They swallowed
stones to help digest their food, stones still littering that field,
brontosauruses still lingering as the green icon on Sinclair Oil signs
across the land while here, where a bulldozer ploughs a new road,
an articulation of crows in the crown of a dead elm—tribunal
for the way we’ve come—their caw, caw, cawing sounds half lullaby,
half scherzo. My friend Diane says the beauty of the world is there
because it hurts. Geronimo refusing to surrender then finally sequestered
to Florida. He who’d roamed his native land, locked up in another. Here
in this field, a few dried up puffballs, each one containing trillions of spores,
a black dust the air finds. Brief diaspora, near or far, depending on wind.
Mark Irwin is the author of 13 collections of poetry, including Once When Green (2025), Joyful Orphan (2023), Shimmer (2020), American Urn: Selected Poems 1987-2014, Tall If (2008), and Bright Hunger (2004). Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Juniper Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and NEA.
Read three poems by Mark Irwin also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Rusya432, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Mark Irwin by Steve Cohen, courtesy USC.
