The Valley Retuned
Martin Elster

A fawn breaks off its play. A doe stops feeding.

A buck smells danger.

The herd, forever on the move, is heeding

the presence of a long-forgotten stranger.

The herd has flown

far from the threat. The willow, a deer staple,

is sprouting up all over Yellowstone.

The silver maple,

witch hazel, sumac, dogwood, oak and hickory

grow as they’ve never grown. The Queen Anne’s lace,

the autumn chicory—

they’re back. And beavers, too, in their old place.

The riverbanks begin to hold once more.

Roots take the edge.

Water has forgotten how to roar,

its current slackened, curving through the sedge.

The beaver gnaws

felled willows into stubs. Clear ponds appear.

The valley drinks. (No pining for applause!)

No grazing here,

the clover, goldenrod, and aster thrive,

dragonflies party in the sun with swallows,

which dart and dive

for insects while a lustful bullfrog wallows.

The roaming pack’s returned to claim the range.

All life now moves within that quiet change.

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7th in the Poetry Super Highway poetry contest

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Martin’s notes: “‘The Valley Retuned’ grew out of my fascination with the return of wolves to Yellowstone in the mid-1990s and the ecological changes associated with their return. The real story is more complicated than the popular idea that ‘wolves saved Yellowstone,’ but I was intrigued by the possibility that restoring one long-absent species could help retune an entire valley.

“I also wrote the poem to fill a gap I had noticed in my Lost Wilds: Elegies for the More-Than-Human World. Much of the book concerns extinction, habitat loss, and ecological damage, and I wanted at least one poem about the opposite process: ecological restoration and the possibility of recovery.

“The form does some retuning of its own. I use a method I call phase drift, in which two formal patterns proceed independently, fall out of alignment, and later meet again. Here, the tercets have lines of 5, 2, and 5 beats, while the rhyme moves in four-line units: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, and so on. Threes against fours: the stanza and rhyme patterns keep slipping past one another, then realign every twelve lines.

“I liked the idea that the form could behave a little like the ecosystem itself—patterns shifting, interacting, and finding a new balance. At the end, the drift stops, and the final rhyming couplet, ‘range/change,’ brings the poem to rest.”

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Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, is a poet, composer, and retired orchestral percussionist who performed with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra for forty-three years. His long career in music has shaped his fondness for meter, rhyme, and sound. His poetry, which often engages with nature, science, animals, music, and the cosmos, has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and abroad, including The Oldie, The Spectator, Light, Star*Line, Snakeskin, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Cambridge University Press’s Outer Space: 100 Poems. His honors include the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition, five Pushcart Prize nominations, and awards from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His recent collections are Axis Denied, Lost Wilds: Elegies for the More-Than-Human World, and From Pawprints to Flight Paths: Animal Lives in Verse.

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The Valley Retuned Martin Elster

The Valley Retuned
Martin Elster