Lisa K. Kerr is a professor of writing and humanities at the Medical University of South Carolina, where she directs the Office of Humanities. She is author/editor of Mysterious Medicine: The Doctor-Scientist Tales of Hawthorne and Poe (Kent State Press) and Dreaming with Animals: Anna Hyatt Huntington and Brookgreen Gardens (University of South Carolina Press), both published under the name L. Kerr Dunn.
This Landscape Must Change
Add in the new gray barn, the spotted bull and his sisters.
The geese so bold this year they walk up from pond to porch.
Add in you, my husband, with your guitars, cameras, woodwork.
Add in the house we have built here, the orchard, the wild cats that have claimed us.
Add in my cancer, the nights we didn’t sleep as we waited, my dreams all premonitions.
Add in the way everything we lost imprinted itself here on the yard and sky.
We see it from our windows. We crawl into bed with it at night.
But add in, too, how no other land could have held us.
Subtract the world always encroaching. Subtract the future.
We are here. We have built all the roads we care to have.
We will make our bodies shelters if this house should crumble.