Last Dream of Earth
In my dream the soil was a soft brown and dry, and fell
from my hands like fine ash.
There was a deserted bush with small oval leaves
like blueberries, delicate and green, too pale
in their thirst, some edges tipped a brittle brown-gray.
From where I crouched, the land tilted down toward a tree
with a wide, spreading canopy. Perhaps an almond, old
and humanly familiar.
I saw in sepia. The dust felt like skin.
I did not hear the wind, or a bee, or a song.
It was evening and I planted what I planted. Dug a dry hole
and placed a large root ball into it. Backfilled.
This didn’t happen in the dream, but I imagine that next I turned
to the old farmhouse, its yellow pale and washed from the sun,
and went inside for a glass of chilled merlot.
And the next day, in my dream, I went to the garden
and the rasping soil was gone from whatever I had planted,
the root ball exposed, boney.
I backfilled it again. Watered again. And again.
And again. Each night,
in this dream, I shoveled, planted, watered.
I imagine the cold red wine in the empty house.
I imagine sleeping like heat sleeps.
And when I went to whatever I wanted to grow,
the sun was low. The ground was thirsty.
The dust began to feel less like skin, more like
the smother of pure wool, too hot, and silenced.
Self-Repair
Sometimes when the sun streams through stained
glass to make patterns of mixed mosaics, I can kaleidoscope
myself into view. I can see
I’ve been the desert moss waiting for rain.
I’ve been the apple blossom beckoning the mason bee.
The morel biding time for fire.
And when I spent too much time as the raven
searching for the wolf’s kill, I would beg
for the rare blue-eyed white one.
Often, I was the dandelion waiting for night to close these hundred petals.
I know I’ve been an unstable snowpack.
And the weight of rain. I’ve been avalanche.
I’ve been buried. But some days, I still cling
like a limpet to rock and go no further in life.
Once, deep in winter, I searched for faces in the trunks of trees.
And when I have craved the slap of rain on a metal roof,
it was for that sharp strength. It was to split the hairs between.
I wanted to feel the rain find grooves in fracture.
Now, there is something like repair.
What to become. I am asking if I am thinking or feeling.
If I am in my own body. If I am the stone or the flower.
Mistee St. Clair is a Rasmuson Foundation and Alaska Literary Award grantee, and published by The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Common, and more. She lives in Lingít Aaní (Juneau), where she hikes, writes, and wanders the mossy rainforest. Her collection Reconciliations will be published by Empty Bowl Press in 2026.
Header photo by Wolfgang Claussen, courtesy Pixabay.
