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      March 14, 2024TrashLowell Jaeger

      This year’s leaves are last year’s leaves
      again. Even the loam breathes.
      I believe this and Leonard YoungBear says
      in the old days there was no such thing as trash:
      Indians camped and left ashes only, or bones,
      bits of hide, feathers, mounds of buffalo dung.
      What the dogs didn’t eat, coyotes did.
      Or wind, snow. Beneath trees and prairie grass
      everything from the earth returned. Human life
      too, Leonard says, should be like that.
      I know, I say, I’m not afraid anymore
      of dying. It’s trash
      that worries me. Caskets. I keep thinking
      of tin cans, foil, yellow rubber raincoats don’t
      rot very quick, don’t burn either; bury them
      and something spits them back. I’d sooner fall
      in the woods, feed the sharp teeth of many hungers
      beyond my own. And part of me will swim downstream
      in the cold eyeball of a fish next time, my soul
      under the wings of a young bird learning to fly.

      from #37 - Summer 2012

      Lowell Jaeger

      “As a teen in the great north woods, I spent long quiet hours in my hometown library, where I found solace from troubles at home, troubles in school, and troubles in the world. I sat in the big leather chairs and read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I had no clear understanding of the book, such a foreign, worldly voice, so unlike the talk of local lumberjacks and factory workers. Yet that poem and I sat and conversed mysteriously beyond the words on the page. For a while, that poem was my best friend. I’d be honored if any poem of mine were ever so esteemed.”

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