Poetry: “Meadow, Early Dark” by Sam Robison
Robison’s “Meadow, Early Dark” unfolds the way all great poems do, reminiscent of poems like Jackson Holbert’s “Unsent Letter to Jakob,” or much of Good Grief, The Ground by Margaret Ray. There’s a billowing outward, the way you would shake out a bedsheet; it starts small and then is suddenly much larger and much more complicated than you realized (those fitted sheets, those corners). Robison claimed initially that anything is possible in the Meadow, but as the poem progresses, it’s clear that this is not only a lie, it’s a kind of denial—the meadow is a place of memories and nostalgia and grief, a symbol of what has been lost, not the possibility of what could be. The transition is smooth and seamless, with Robison’s careful shifts in indents and line breaking. We don’t know what’s happened until it’s too late to turn back and chose another path, another way out of the woods, so we have to keep going forward, hoping it gets better, even if Robison’s speaker doesn’t.
Anything is possible in the meadow in early dark.
I look in it and I see plenty. By where it meets
the forest, the first person I thought I loved looking
exactly how she looked when I loved her, a cough
drop still in her mouth. Out closer toward
the middle, how I said nothing as my dad spread
his dead mom’s ashes, his eyes turned away from
the dust of her bones to look right at me, pleading
I speak.
Where the seep
drives a green gash through all the tall, dead yellow,
how an old friend, night after night one summer,
drank away so much pain. In the muck of that seep,
in its larvae pockets, how I let him.
In early dark, I hate the meadow, though I do not
peel away. I let its riffle of backward time
try hard to drown me. The meadow does
such work so beautifully. The meadow hurts bad.
The meadow is rife with ticks. I am just a kid in
the meadow, peach drool on the front of my shirt.
Then I grow, glint with recklessness. Then I am old,
trying for a hundred reasons not to die.
Sam Robison
Sam Robison (he/him) is a poet and tradesperson in rural Northwest Washington. His work appears in Moss, EcoTheo, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He was the 2024 recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency and holds an MFA from the University of Montana.
