Burrowed out of dark
climbed the ladder of myself
until my bark itched
and I forked the air.

First leaf fall
rain poured grief through the sudden sky
sap slowed in my veins.

Two hundred summers
locked in my airless archive.

I've seen everything on this rock hillside
come and go.

Mud clot root feet sunk deep.

Deaf
from birdsong and wind.

Exhausted
by mast years
the million buds, the thousand nestlings

weight of my limbs

pale green lichens
still bursting wild
from their furrows.

In the heat of an August afternoon

impossible
not to think of
long muscle
elbows and ankles

you stroke
my smooth limbs
like a lover.

A sound like paper, the first
tear.

Year after year

I split open
your binary obsessions
naked clothed
pure indecent

the colour of a skin.

Red bark curls back
and falls
carelessly
on a bed of tinder.

I split open
shame
to strip
your mind

undress
your haute couture, fast fashion, thrift store glad rags
sackcloth and ashes

reveal
another skin
green as innocence.

Not a dressing
this woven root
that binds
the old springboard
scars

this amputation
fresh in ring time.

Not an ascension
no crown this tasseled
hemlock head dress
seedling
sprung from
my once vast
fortune of cellulose
reduced to common nurse log.

Not an interment
this sarcophagus
assembling itself
around me.

Not death.
Not birth.

Where were you when I was
knee deep in the fields
at the end of the street
royal-purple-strewn-2000-count
green satin
waiting for you to stretch full length?
Slipped your mind
while you were calculating your taxes
painting the spare room Balboa mist.

Never mind
I've withered time and time
again. Dig for sustenance
don't give me up for dead
or that imposter
Zigadenus.

I'll be
two thumbs under
doing my figuring
only as far as spring.

More to me than
this slow rise to rain's
knocking

my buried
body's vast white mycelium
threading the dark
necropolis
of beetle and worm

singing with urgent
underground
traffic.

No ruffled
perfumed
coming out
for greedy bees.

I lift my rag and bone
up
cycled
sexless flesh
smelling of mould and dry spores

into light

where everything falls
from above

into the soft lap
of duff

into forest air
stirring

my virtuous
already bruising
pleats.

Alison Watt is a painter and writer who lives on Protection Island in Nanaimo B.C. Her first book, The Last Island, a Naturalist's Sojourn on Triangle Island won the Edna Staebler award for Canadian nonfiction. She has published a book of poetry, Circadia, and a novel, Dazzle Patterns, which was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award.

"As a naturalist, I often turn to field guides. Since I trained as a biologist, over the years I have come to understand that the scientific paradigm has left us estranged from other living things. In the effort not to anthropomorphise, the emotional content has been stripped from the natural world. These poems are a response. Imagine a field guide with not only a scientific description but also a poetic one."

The winner of the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January. The 2022 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.