Poem: Field Guide to the Chaparral

P O E M
Leah Naomi Green, “Field Guide to the Chaparral” from
The More Extravagant Feast. Copyright © 2020 by Leah
Naomi Green. Reprinted with the permission of The
Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press,
graywolfpress.org.
Field Guide to the Chaparral
The fire beetle only mates
when the chaparral is burning,
and the water beetle
will only mate in the rain.
In the monastery’s kitchen, the nuns
don’t believe me
when I tell them how old I am,
that you were married before.
The woman you find attractive
does not believe me when I look at her kindly.
There are candescent people in the world.
It will only be love

that I love you with.
When we get home,

there will be our kitchen, the dishes undone.
There will be our bedroom.
What is it you eventually recognized
in my face that allowed you to believe me?

Beauty that did not come from you—
remember how it did not come from you?

As white sage does not come from the moon
but is found by it and lit.

The Buddhists say
that the front of the paper

cannot exist without the back.
Because there is a there,

there is a here. Chaparral,
the density of growth,

and the tattered chaps
the mappers wore through it because they had to,
to keep walking without

being hurt. It is OK if we hurt
one another.

Chaparral needs fire.
(The pinecones would not open

otherwise.) Love needs lover,
whose last lover was flood.

Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More
Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press), selected by
Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of The
Academy of American Poets. Green teaches English
and environmental studies at Washington and Lee
University. She lives in an ecological community
in Rockbridge County, Virginia, US, where she and
her family homestead and grow much of their food
for the year. Their deep aspiration is to transform
the ecological community into a Plum Village lay
practitioners’ community. Please reach out to Leah via
her website if you are interested!
www.leahnaomigreen.com/contact
Above photo courtesy of monastic Sangha

Island by Julie Lai