There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral
By Elizabeth Jacobson
Parlor Press | 2025 | 114 pages
What is the sword so sharp that a feather blown against it cuts away delusion? is the question that opens Elizabeth Jacobson’s new collection of poems, There Are As Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral. The question is a Zen koan—a paradoxical anecdote or riddle used to demonstrate the limits of logical reasoning in the pursuit of enlightenment. In this historical moment with mounting news of environmental devastation each day, Jacobson’s lyrical, poignant poems show us a world that leaves us with more questions than answers, a world that she sees as purely and completely as possible.
The opening koan appears in The Blue Cliff record and was originally written in China in 1125. The answer the readers are given is “Each branch of coral holds up the moon.” This is clearly not a logical answer, but the poem of this title that follows reveals one way of understanding it.
Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Moon
The Yolgnu people of Australia envision our moon
Filling with ocean water like breath coursing into a body,
Then washing out again. This is their theory of tides.
And just as each branch of coral upholds the glow from our moon,
Everything touches everything else, no matter where
Any one thing or any billions of things exist in the span
Of space and time yet no things become two.
This is our essential nature, revealed
By hair-splitting blade of the sharpest sword
As it conjures distinction.
There are as many songs in the world as branches of coral:
Each one a glorious, brutal dream.
To remove our delusion, the opening poem suggests, we must realize that like the coral that upholds the moon, every single thing on our earth also reflects that moon and is connected. Everything touches everything else and “no things become two. This is our essential nature.” The idea of “not two” is a fundamental concept in Buddhist thought that embodies the idea of interconnection. Splitting this whole into distinctions, the poet asserts, results in “as many songs in the world as branches of coral: / Each one a glorious, brutal dream.”
Jacobson’s poems in this collection work at cutting away delusion and fully witnessing our deeply troubled and interconnected existence. Jacobson is relentless in her ability to see and witness, and to taste—literally—all of life, while simultaneously enacting love for an often brutal and rapidly fracturing earth. In her poems, we find ourselves sometimes “under royal palms and stadium lamps,” and at others seeing “faint rainbows above the mountains,” in a world where she notices both “the puzzly growth of ponderosa bark” and “plastic fumes,” as life unfolds unbearably. Suffering is ever-present on personal and global levels: A forest burns as the laundry is spinning, a baby who cannot swallow slowly fades away, another friend is dying from cancer, a high school love is killed “when a town truck jumped the curb— / its chain snaking behind the flatbed, hooked him around the waist, then dragged him through the quiet streets,” and the glacier Okjökull disappears. A note at the end of the book explains to the reader that there is a sign next to the space that Okjökull occupied that reads: “In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.” This book makes it clear that Jacobson knows what is happening to our planet and to human hearts. Not only does she see and know, she wants to feel it deeply.
The title poem, in which the poet is wandering the beach picking up elkhorn coral, the branches of coral broken off from a coral reef that is threatened with extinction due to ocean acidification, she recalls walking through a space of utter horror and loss, a concentration camp. “There were no clouds / that day / I visited Birkenau…” points to the perplexing ability of the world to go on after the unthinkable occurs. These poems are almost an answer to Theodore Adorno who famously provoked other writers by saying, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Certainly one interpretation of this quote might be that poetry is impossible after the Holocaust, that beauty for beauty’s sake without awareness of the excruciating truths of a historical context is cruel or offensive. But Adorno also believed that art and society are intertwined. While the meaning of his provocation is contested, my use of it here (which borrows from Antony Rowland) is to point to Adorno’s belief that one who lives in an immoral society will find it hard to be truly moral within that society, but if poetry is able to forge a new language and speaks against the norms of culture, in “barbaric” or “unsophisticated” ways, it could potentially offer necessary insight and critique. Jacobson, who sucked the salt from star fish as a child, refuses to leave these scenes of Birkenau without piercing her own and her reader’s equilibrium. “I ate a few blades of grass / peeled off a strip of bark / pressed two sharp stones /into my well-made shoes.”
“Nothing is made less by dying,” the poet writes in “Canyon Road,” after hitting ice and spinning in a car to discover that she has hit a coyote. Like Aldo Leopold in “Thinking Like a Mountain,” who watches the green fire die in a wolf’s eye and ever-after realizes the importance of all beings, the poet also remains present. Rather than being merely an observer, the narrator becomes a death doula for the injured animal:
The canine holds my gaze
as I cradle his head,
one palm above his brow
the other on his snout,
and hug him to my thigh
until the chasm
of his breath closes.
The poet stays with this suffering creature as “yellow flecks inside his eyes flash for an instant before they turn to ice.” With a small gesture of covering his body with snow, she enacts a kind of burial ritual, honoring the deceased. This act of care, of attention to what is here, as difficult as that may be, as futureless as that may be, seems to be one of the projects of this book.
The entire scene exemplifies the stance this poet has toward a world that is getting destroyed by reckless human behavior. Here is a poet who does not place blame outside herself, but instead steps fully into the realm of a balanced awareness of the fragile beauty of the earth’s systems and the human complicity in the destruction.
In a moment when many are witnessing radical shifts in ecosystems and weather patterns and familiar landscapes, many are experiencing what has come to be called solastalgia. The term solastalgia, coined by Glenn Albrect in 2003, essentially describes a state of distress or homesickness for a landscape that has been affected by environmental change. For Jacobson, no environment seems unscathed in this moment of mass extinction, global warming, forest fires, and ubiquitous overconsumption.
The line “Nothing is made less by dying” is a reminder that this life mattered, but also that this life is part of the system that holds all, that this body will return to the earth:
Walking the next morning,
in the early fog,
I watch a Cooper’s hawk
fly up and up above the road
to scan the world for prey,
then spiral down, effortlessly
The poet intimately loves the natural world and wants desperately to save even the smallest beings. In “The Pine Forest is My Home,” she spends time near a stream watching caterpillars:
Watercress grows on the banks of the stream
and the woods race wild with small-budded red columbine—
Indian paintbrush splashed everywhere, shadowing
the lankiness of daisies. I feel so close to the hundreds
of caterpillars that stand upright on the tall blades of grass.
They sway back and forth with the wind as if in supplication
to the sky. Hear them drop off—then listen—they slide back
to the same stalk of grass.
and at the end of the poem:
soaking my tired feet in the cold water,
I rescue a wriggling caterpillar before it drowns.
What is excruciating is when offering succor or ministration is impossible. In “Eye of a Storm,” Jacobson writes about the desire to put feelings of helplessness away to keep from drowning:
We should all have pockets for our feelings
the way True’s beaked whales have pockets for their fins
and can tuck them in for efficient movement during diving.
…
My feelings—red in tooth and claw—
for this primate in a tiny glass cage
who has been experimented on, are hanging all over
my mind in tufts and blisters the way the fur,
and the skin underneath the fur, is hanging all over
this creature’s body. His penis is raw with open sores.
We see him considering the lens of the camera,
and then the person filming—Won’t you help me?—
And then more videos pop up on my laptop.
The absolute agony of this reality and the culpability of humans, our shock as well as our ability to be distracted, encapsulates our current predicament. In these poems, after a day of reciting a litany of absences and loss, “on an island made mostly of cement” with no grackles and where “the mangrove forest is no longer a forest,” and “you can feel incremental disaster in each second,” the poet recognizes that despite hitting the bottom, “humans can feel buoyancy, even if it is unwarranted.”
There Are As Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral offers us an invitation to see without blinders beyond the Pollyanna ideas of recovery, without focusing on a different future, but instead to hold and to honor the one we are losing. Like the animals she lists who are dying in a wildfire––”the deer, the elk, the rabbits, the coyotes, the flies, the wolves, the raccoon, the marmots, the mice, the moles, the rats, the lizards, the snakes, the butterflies, the spiders, the worms, the skinks, the bears, and all the birds”––each being has a song, and we must listen before the singing ends. Our full presence in the interconnected world is the gift, the answer to the koan. In “Given an Invitation,” the poet writes of a winter day where she has been watching birds:
Huddled in
close to the place where a branch meets the trunk were a
few small birds who stay the winter. Pressing their wings
firm to their bodies, their backs mounded with fresh snow
like tops of fence posts— they were singing with fury. A
chorale performing for an audience of aspens and pines.
They were singing
For the rapture of being
Covered in snow, in winter
Heather Swan is the author of Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection. Her previous book, Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in About Place, Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Sun. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cold Mountain, The Hopper, One Art, Poet Lore, Phoebe, and The Raleigh Review. Her book of poems, A Kinship with Ash, published in 2020, was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. A second collection, Dandelion, was published in 2023. She is also a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the Maud Weinshenk Award, the August Derleth Prize for Poetry, the John Tigges Poetry Award, a Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Award, an honorable mention for the Lorine Niedecker Award, and a Nelson Institute for Environmental CHE Alumni Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Read three poems by Heather Swan appearing in Terrain.org.
Header image by Natali Snailcat, courtesy Shutterstock.
