Stephen Germic is a professor of American literature at Rocky Mountain College in Montana. He is the author of  American Green  (Lexington Books, 2001). He has written on a wide variety of American literary and cultural topics and taught at several universities, including Michigan State, Wayne State, and James Madison. When not teaching in Montana, he can usually be found writing or fishing in upper Michigan. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in  The Cape Rock, Carolina Quarterly, Coe Review, Eclectica, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Verdad, and  Westview.

Two Poems (August 20, 2011. Issue 30.)

Removing The Tick

The tick is best lifted and coaxed off the
flesh with a knife. Often, it will leave
its head behind, still nestled under layers of
warm skin—no longer to suck blood, but
to fester. The infectious, severed head of
the tick may require its own treatment.

If properly removed then no mark will
remain. The tick may even survive. Some
prefer this: to save the life of the tick.

Near Lake Superior, at midday
in mid-June, the air alive with
flies and the birds that feed
on flies, we removed a hard tick
from the tender skin near the back,
inside, very crest of your thigh.
And we let it go, to feed again,
or not, but to anyway
live for a time at least with the
memory of surely near the
greatest glory in the history
of all the lives of ticks.

This is the only tick I have ever let live.

In summer, in the northern woods,
I carry a knife and a lighter. I scrape
the discovered or hunted tick onto the
blade and I burn it without ceremony.

The tick sizzles, bulges, and pops.

The tick cannot be crushed between
fingers or swatted or even squashed
underfoot as if it were some common
bug. It cannot simply be shaken or brushed
away. A dog will scratch
and chew, but the tick will remain.

Delicately remove the entire tick with
a very sharp knife. Put it to flame until
it boils and bursts. Perform no ceremony.
Leave only the trace of memory.

New Terrors

New terrors this year by the
house at the lake include an acre
cleared for a new cabin, I
presume, though for now just an
acre cleared just where the
eagles nested. No eagles.

Today a bass boat. If I wake tomorrow
and find myself God—as has
apparently happened to others—
then the rest of the world will
wake to empty garages, trailers
burdened of nothing, fishermen
turned to swimmers, all bass boats
gone to brief mist, a jubilee for
all birds and other guests of once
and once again quiet lakes.

One very old terror discovered through
symptoms: the greater weight of
the canoe, an earlier drifting toward
more disturbed sleep, and much worse,
a noticeable loss of the known world
and its names. A few I have, for a time,
recovered: black locust, American
redstart, ebony-winged damselfly,
lesser celandine. But there is surely lost
some fair piece of what else remains with
lunatic endurance on this temporary earth.