I lie on the deck on my back, listening to the cragged,woody bristle of a borer bee chewing the whole thingout from under me, thinking of my friend Robertvisiting his childhood home in the mid-westernhardwood forests, how, as he tramped among the grovesand gullies, one old oak told him it was the same, and not,yet he was moved to love the way the place had grownup around his memory of it and was new. To protecthappens first and mostly in the heart, though preciouslittle separates it from possession. What effortto keep from carving your initials there, like a spoiled lover.What toil to prevent some other from doing the same.Some tasks are small and easy graces—the way the lupinecups the rain in its sleeves all day, the way my sister taughtmy grandmother, before her mind went, two new waysof expressing herself: Fuck, and I love you. Some tasksyou do with fear and tenderness together: axingthe cloud-bitten ice of the trough again and again because the farm animals must drink, killing a crow to hangon a fencepost for the sake of the fruit, or carrying the bright-bodied wasps out of the house in the morninghours when they are still too cold to sting.
A Brief History of Preservation
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- May 2, 2025
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“A Brief History of Preservation” from Your Mother’s Bear Gun: by Corrie Williamson.
Published by River River Books on Jan 28, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Corrie Wiliamson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Corrie Williamson is the author of three books of poems, Your Mother’s Bear Gun (River River Books, 2025), The River Where You Forgot My Name (a 2019 Montana Book Award Finalist), and Sweet Husk (winner of the 2014 Perugia Press Prize). She is also co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to the Rocky Mountains, forthcoming in 2027 from Mountaineers Books. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Ecotone, AGNI, and elsewhere, as well as recent anthologies such as Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, and Cascadia Field Guide. She lives in Montana, where she works in conservation.
The poems in Corrie Williamson's Your Mother’s Bear Gun exist in thresholds, in liminal spaces: emotional and physical landscapes at the blurring of safety and danger, the point where preservation of self becomes harm to others. This collection explores the rugged wildernesses of Oregon, Montana, and Appalachia, inviting the reader to consider what it means to be human in a rough and hungry world. How do we protect ourselves? How do we care for each other? We pay attention, Corrie Williamson suggests. We listen. We let the wild light into our bones.
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