Photograph by Ryan Collerd, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage
Before I read Brian Teare’s poem, “Doomstead Days,” I had never heard of a doomstead. It’s a clever portmanteau, combining homestead with doomsday: an alternative universe where the homestead is a preparation for the climate apocalypse.
The poem Brian weaves around his encounter with this word is a lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve.
Brian’s exploration of the doomstead unearths some vital questions about ecological crisis. How do we respond? How are we, as a society, fleeing to our doomsteads and hiding, waiting for disaster, hoping to survive? What does it look like for us to leave our doomsteads, engage the problems directly, and find collective solutions?
Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and seven books of poetry, including, Doomstead Days, which won the Four Quartets Prize. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pew. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. He’s also an editor and publisher and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Photograph by Ryan Collerd, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage
At over 1300 words, this poem is much longer than the others we’ve featured in our Poets series, but it’s worth it.
This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
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Photograph by MC Hyland
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Doomstead Days
By Brian Teare
today’s gender is rain
it touches everything
with its little silver
epistemology
mottled like a brook trout
with a hundred spots
white as bark scars
on this slim trunk
thrust up from
one sidewalk square
the four square feet
of open ground
given a street tree
twiggy perimeter
continually clipped
by parking or car door
or passing trash truck
that snaps an actual
branch I find haunting
the little plot
its winged achenes
auto-rotate down to
it’s not that I don’t
like a wide sidewalk
or the 45 bus
that grinds right by
but if organisms
didn’t insist on
forms of resistance
they’d be dead
of anthropocentric
technomechanical
systems whose grids
restrict the living
through perpetual stress
that elicits intense
physical response
like an animal
panic hitting
the psoas with cramps
or root fungus sunk in
the maple’s allotment
of city property
as tolerably wide
as the migraine
that begins at the base
of my skull & pinches
with breadth calipers
my temples until
the feel of flay arrays
the dura’s surface
inside the bones inside
the head the healer holds
in her hands & says
the occiput is shut
flat & irks the nerves
that thread through its
unappeasable shunt
into the spine I see
a white light I keep
thinking about the way
long drought dries out
topsoil so deep beneath
its surface the first
hard rain wreaks flood
taking the good dirt
with it the way today’s
wet excess escapes
its four square feet
of exposed root
& rivers out
a flex of sediment
alluvial over
the civic cement
of the anthropocene
in currents a supple
rippled velvet dun
as Wissahickon creek
in fall’s brief season
of redd & spawn
when brook trout
in chill quick shallows
once dug into gravel
to let nested eggs
mix with milt
& turn pearls
translucent as raw
unpolished quartz
each white eyed ova
flawed by a black fleck
my eyes close over
at the height of migraine
fertile error waiting
with incipient tail
ready to propel it
deeper into nausea
until the healer halts
its hatching & calms
neuralgia between
the heels of her hands
pressing the occiput
back open into
the natural curve
the bones forget
the way the banks
of the Wissahickon
have forgotten rapids
rinsing schist shaded
by hemlock that kept
the brook trout cold
each patterned aspect
of habitat lost
first to dams & mills
& industry runoff
& plots of flax
Germantown planted
for paper & cloth
made with water’s power
& hauled out of
the precipitous gorge
up rough narrow roads
south to the city port
before adelgids
took the crucial dark
from under hemlocks
sun heating the rocky
creek down steep rills
to the lower Schuylkill
wide in its final miles
dammed at Fairmount
for two centuries
of coal silt & dredge
fabric dye & sewage
that gave rise to typhus
& refinery spills
that gave rise to fire
rinsed by this gender
that remembers
current’s circuit
anadromous shad
& striped bass
leaving the Atlantic
heading upriver
shedding saltwater
for fresh in runs
whose numbers turned
the green river silver
if color counts as
epistemology
spring sun on the backs
of a thousand shad
is a form of knowing
local to another
century & the duller
color of ours
is the way the word
gender remembers
it once meant to fuck
beget or give birth
sibling to generate
& engender all
fertile at the root
& continuous
as falling water
molecules smoothing
the sparkling gnarl
of Wissahickon schist
until its surface
mirrors their force
the fuel element
& fundament...
