How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) Read online

  job is to inherit the earth.

  Meekly they wait,

  eating their lot of soil

  to improve its nature.

  Pitilessly they come,

  the raiding warriors

  six hundred strong

  storming the chambers,

  crushing pale bodies

  to carry off for fodder

  but always stopping

  short of the full execution.

  They leave the queen alive.

  The Victorians wrote of

  Nature red in tooth and claw,

  knowing not the half of it:

  still undiscovered, the likes

  of the disciplined Matabele

  ants that spare the crown;

  or the civil virus houseguest

  that visits for five days

  and then departs before

  its sniffling host succumbs.

  Nature is nothing if not

  a congress of partial kindness.

  And who is to say

  where cruelty and mercy

  may lie down together

  to make their mottled children?

  In the sickbed from which

  the newly hale will rise

  and go forth to shed

  the seeds of their affliction.

  In the throbbing abdomen

  of one queen alone

  in her darkness, pulsing

  eggs, beginning again

  the rearing of future

  fodder, attuned to a rogue

  vibration, listening

  for the barbarians at the gate.

  Great Barrier

  The cathedral is burning. Absent flame or smoke,

  stained glass explodes in silence, fractal scales

  of angel damsel rainbow parrot. Charred beams

  of blackened coral lie in heaps on the sacred floor,

  white stones fallen from high places, spires collapsed,

  crushing the sainted turtle and gargoyle octopus.

  Something there is in my kind that cannot love

  a reef, a tundra, a plain stone breast of desert, ever

  quite enough. A tree perhaps, once recomposed

  as splendid furniture. A forest after the whole of it

  is planed to posts and beams and raised to a heaven

  of earnest construction in the name of Our Lady.

  All Paris stood on the bridges to watch her burning,

  believing a thing this old, this large and beautiful,

  must be holy and cannot be lost. And coral temples

  older than Charlemagne suffocate unattended,

  bleach and bleed from the eye, the centered heart.

  Lord of leaves and fishes, lead me across this great divide.

  Teach me how to love the sacred places, not as one

  devotes to One who made me in his image and is bound

  to love me back. I mean as a body loves its microbial skin,

  the worm its nape of loam, all secret otherness forgiven.

  Love beyond anything I will ever make of it.

  Forests of Antarctica

  From here the oldest trees will speak

  to one another in the oldest language,

  chemical breath, touch in darkness,

  rootlets seeking rootlets holding

  hands underground for succor. And I

  could pass among them hearing nothing.

  Or I could pause on the tilted light

  of slate-scrabbled path in a silence

  of moss and try to fathom their stillness:

  How nothing stirs their hearts.

  How patience is a promise a seed makes

  to its ground, from the day of cracking

  and rooting in, clinging to this escarpment

  since before the trial of Socrates, before

  the tilting up of plinths at Stonehenge.

  Already ringed with moss and age

  when Jesus walked out of Nazareth.

  Betrothal of these giants to their place

  has left them crouched on buttressed trunks

  high above the ground, leg-roots exposed

  by all the rains that have washed the earth

  out from under them since the beginning.

  Everything has already happened here.

  Still the ancient beeches hold their ground

  with moss-knuckled toes, remembering

  a Gondwanaland of their youth when

  faraway Antarctica was yet a forested nation.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder they braced

  for the breaking apart of the known,

  a rumbling violence of stones, mountain

  dashed against mountain, two ships parting.

  The trees exhaled in communion, rode their

  new continents, survived the end of one world.

  In the Great Dividing Range I crave to repent.

  In filtered tree fern light I confess the sins

  of my tribe: we worship the future, demean

  the past, pay no mind to the present.

  But a future, cut off from the promise of ever

  joining history, lies already dead on its altar

  while we chew on our restless feet.

  What’s to become of our own seeds

  and betrothals: all these floss-haired children

  inside us that want to live? Want to move,

  stay, eat the soil from under the house,

  move on. Want to hold fast but cannot

  hold still. I am lifting them up

  as newborns to the nursery window

  looking out on the forests of Antarctica.

  I tell them: This is your home.

  Tell them: None of this is yours.

  Do not believe as I did. When

  the world breaks open, fall apart

  with her entrails, fall with the stones or fly.

  Let the crush of it make you into some

  new thing not yourself. See how these trees

  take the teat of the world and suckle it,

  drinking time, knowing it is perfect

  with or without them. Lacking their religion,

  you will have to make your own.

  You are the world that stirs. This is the world that waits.

  Notes

  “How to Fly” borrows an image—the unbodied breath of a bird—from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”

  “How to Survive This” was published in the New York Times Magazine, March 26, 2020.

  “How to Be Married” is for Rob and Paula Kingsolver.

  “How to Love Your Neighbor” is for Frances Goldin.

  “How to Be Hopeful,” part of the Duke University commencement address, May 2009, was published in Creating a Life You’ll Love, edited by Mark Chimsky-Lustig (Sellers Publishing, 2009).

  The cycle Pellegrinaggio is dedicated con tanto amore to Joann Hopp, who was born (and, frankly, remains) Giovanna Spano.

  “This Is How They Come Back to Us” owes its title and spirit to Wendell Berry. The poems in this section are for the dead who are named and the living who bear their losses, especially Anna and Clara Petri, Sara Hopp, Joann Hopp, and Joe Findley.

  For “My Mother’s Last Forty Minutes” I’m indebted to my sister, brother, and father, custodians of their own versions of this story, with a nod to William Carlos Williams’s “XXII” from Spring and All.

  The italicized lines in “My First Derby Party” are from the song “My Old Kentucky Home,” by Stephen Foster. The poem is dedicated to Fenton Johnson.

  “Creation Stories,” “Meadowview Elementary Spelling Bee,” “Blow Me—,” and “After” are for Camille and Lily Kingsolver.

  The title “Walking Each Other Home” acknowledges accidental similarity to a quote from Ram Dass, “We are always walking each other home.” The poem is dedicated to Felicia Mitchell.

  “Cage of Heaven” borrows images and lines from these poems by Emily Dickinson: “Some keep the Sabbath goi
ng to church,” “I felt a Funeral in my brain,” “Who has not found the heaven below,” “To fight aloud is very brave,” and “A narrow fellow in the grass.”

  “Insomniac Villanelle” is for my three A.M. friends, with thanks to Sally Carpenter.

  “My Afternoon with The Postman” describes Vincent van Gogh’s portraits of his mail carrier, Joseph Roulin, with thanks to the Barnes Foundation gallery in Philadelphia, where one of these masterpieces hangs unobtrusively in a corner.

  “Where It Begins” was previously published in slightly different form in Knitting Yarns, edited by Ann Hood (W. W. Norton, 2014); and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014, edited by Deborah Blum and Tim Folger (Houghton Mifflin, 2014). The epigraph is from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Wintering.”

  “Ghost Pipes” was published in Orion, Autumn 2020. Ghost Pipes are Monotropa uniflora (also known as corpse plant or Indian pipe), found in woodlands of North America, European Russia, and Asia. The freelance life is never simple.

  “Ephemera” is dedicated to the staff and friends of the Blue Ridge Discovery Center in Konnarock, Virginia.

  “Love Poem, with Birds” is for Steven Hopp.

  “Cradle” is dedicated to Alicia Paghera.

  “Mussel, Minnow” lists a few of many deceptions used by American freshwater mussels for the transport of their larvae; for an overview, see “How Mussels Fool Fish into Carrying Their Parasitic Babies,” by Jason Bittel, in National Geographic, November 28, 2017.

  “Great Barrier” was published in Time magazine, September 12, 2019. One of its lines echoes the opening of “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

  “Forests of Antarctica” gratefully acknowledges inspiration from the lines “I am the earth that waits. / You are the earth that walks,” from “What the Trail Says,” by Pamela Alexander, in Slow Fire. The referenced trees are Antarctic beeches (Nothofagus moorei) in the Great Dividing Range of Australia, part of the relict Gondwana Rainforest that once dominated Antarctica. They became Australian flora when the two continents separated 180 million years ago. Individual trees on Mount Bithongabel are 2,500 to 3,000 years old, with some cloned groupings estimated to be as old as 15,000 years.

  About the Author

  BARBARA KINGSOLVER’s books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction are widely translated and have won numerous literary awards. She is the founder of the PEN/Bellwether Prize, and in 2000 was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Prior to her writing career she studied and worked as a biologist. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Barbara Kingsolver

  Fiction

  Unsheltered

  Flight Behavior

  The Lacuna

  Prodigal Summer

  The Poisonwood Bible

  Pigs in Heaven

  Animal Dreams

  Homeland and Other Stories

  The Bean Trees

  Essays

  Small Wonder

  High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never

  Nonfiction

  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (with Steven L. Hopp, Camille Kingsolver, and Lily Hopp Kingsolver)

  Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands (with photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt)

  Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983

  Copyright

  HOW TO FLY (IN TEN THOUSAND EASY LESSONS). Copyright © 2020 by Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  Cover photograph © FarukUlay/E+/Getty Images

  Originally published as How to Fly in Great Britain in 2020 by Faber and Faber.

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-299314-4

  Version 08112020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-299308-3

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