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15. Brian Teare — "Doomstead Days"
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.
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.
Brian Teare
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.
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 f**k
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 alike
derive thriving from
being at its biggest
when it’s kinetic
energy headed
toward intensity
everything’s body
connected by this
totally elastic
materiality
I feel as ecstatic
wide dilation
when the shut skull
gives up resistance
to the healer’s hands
& the occiput
opens its bones
my mind’s eye goes
okay I’m awake now
rowdy with trout
psoas relaxed
my body’s a conduit
it roars with water
passing from past
to present through
pipes & riparian
ecotones alike
all of my fluids
pollutants cycling
back into my own
watershed toxins
& heavy metals
bonded to blood
stored in liver & fat
C8 glyphosate
mercury & lead
it’s awkward okay
I keep thinking about
the man who asks me
to visit his doomstead
which seems kinky
for a first date
what’s the safeword
for men with genders
built for the world’s end
men with weaponized
genders hoarding solar
power & canned goods
bottled water genders
tending small vegetable
gardens out back
behind the chickens
concrete genders sealed
in lead their doors
secured from inside
with thick steel bars
fringe libertarian
endtimes genders
hetero girlie
camo gun calendars
apocalyptic tits
pinned on brick walls
by lone bunks
so the men can cross out
each day once
civil society
ends with a pathetic
snivel like please help
doomstead men live
doomstead days already
sealed in extreme fiction
as if there were
ever a way to stay
safely self-contained
by which I mean
the anthropocene
is its own gender
biospheric in scale
its persistent flux
from fossil record
to Antarctic ice core
so uncontainable
we all exhibit it
with a local sense
of personal chosen
expression strategic
or contingent
like fertility
medicalized tracked
managed or casual
happy f*****g
without a condom
risky given the odds
leveraged against us
& the blameless
microbes seeking
homes in our nooks
& tubes so I don’t
visit his doomstead
a psychic structure
I feel in my head
as blocked thought
I watch play out
in the Schuylkill
where it pools wide
shallow with silt
above Fairmount dam
I stand on the bank
& know I’m not
supposed to posit
an analogy
between the river
& my body but
courtesy of this dam
the city siphons
its water into me
another human
intervention
diverting its path
each of my cells
a little prison
the river sits in
so we’re related
on a molecular
level so intimate
I think I can say
it wants speed
& movement free
enough to jump
the strained relation
to human needs
it serves without relief
without the hands
that hold my bones
& tend my fascia
that remember
a different posture
without blockage
or pain a model
for undoing harm
done by capital
empowered to frack
during record drought
millions of gallons
of toxic wastewater
injected into earth
or kept in open ponds
prone & porous
in western counties
where river otters
have rebounded after
last being spotted
in the Allegheny
in 1899
otters are raucous
& chirp chitter
chuckle & grumble
when wrestling together
or sliding on ice
playful biophony
rivers have missed
for a whole century
like brook trout rooting
in loose cool gravel
or the plash of insects
fallen from hemlocks
the intact eastern
riverine biome
one serious mess
of sound enmeshed
in sound enmeshed
in biotic patterns
as heavy as traffic
when the weekend
weather is nice
& I ride the early
27 bus
to the Wissahickon
it’s not that I don’t like
the city it’s just if
biodiversity
is a measure of health
a city is
by definition sick
with people & built
structures crowding
out other lives
though I love signs
species persist
this sidewalk moss
probably bryum
argentum native
to guano-covered
seabird rookeries
this fertile gingko
stinking up the street
with stone fruits
crushed underfoot
this nameless fern
in a downpipe drain
so modest in scale
like the simple songs
of house sparrows
everywhere though
this chubby one
is hustling a fallen
everything bagel
of seeds & crumbs
& it’s not that I don’t
like people either
our sociality
genitals & smells
interesting diction
surprising privacies
revealed at parties
bars & in bedrooms
our genders in acts
various & wet
as thought product
of dissolved salts
washing our brains
in rich cognition
that falters without
water which can’t be
taken by the head
in the hands & held
in the hopes of healing
its body is too vast
its mind boundless
by definition
the world is awake
be careful my dears
it is the gender
that remembers
everything
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.chrysalispodcast.org
Copyright Credit: Brian Teare, "Doomstead Days" from Doomstead Days. Copyright © 2019 by Brian Teare. Reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books.
Recommended Media
Nightboat Books
Link To Complete Poem
Credits
This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and edited by Sarah Westrich and Mo Armstrong. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.chrysalispodcast.org
View all episodes
By John Fiege
5
55 ratings
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.
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.
Brian Teare
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.
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 f**k
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 alike
derive thriving from
being at its biggest
when it’s kinetic
energy headed
toward intensity
everything’s body
connected by this
totally elastic
materiality
I feel as ecstatic
wide dilation
when the shut skull
gives up resistance
to the healer’s hands
& the occiput
opens its bones
my mind’s eye goes
okay I’m awake now
rowdy with trout
psoas relaxed
my body’s a conduit
it roars with water
passing from past
to present through
pipes & riparian
ecotones alike
all of my fluids
pollutants cycling
back into my own
watershed toxins
& heavy metals
bonded to blood
stored in liver & fat
C8 glyphosate
mercury & lead
it’s awkward okay
I keep thinking about
the man who asks me
to visit his doomstead
which seems kinky
for a first date
what’s the safeword
for men with genders
built for the world’s end
men with weaponized
genders hoarding solar
power & canned goods
bottled water genders
tending small vegetable
gardens out back
behind the chickens
concrete genders sealed
in lead their doors
secured from inside
with thick steel bars
fringe libertarian
endtimes genders
hetero girlie
camo gun calendars
apocalyptic tits
pinned on brick walls
by lone bunks
so the men can cross out
each day once
civil society
ends with a pathetic
snivel like please help
doomstead men live
doomstead days already
sealed in extreme fiction
as if there were
ever a way to stay
safely self-contained
by which I mean
the anthropocene
is its own gender
biospheric in scale
its persistent flux
from fossil record
to Antarctic ice core
so uncontainable
we all exhibit it
with a local sense
of personal chosen
expression strategic
or contingent
like fertility
medicalized tracked
managed or casual
happy f*****g
without a condom
risky given the odds
leveraged against us
& the blameless
microbes seeking
homes in our nooks
& tubes so I don’t
visit his doomstead
a psychic structure
I feel in my head
as blocked thought
I watch play out
in the Schuylkill
where it pools wide
shallow with silt
above Fairmount dam
I stand on the bank
& know I’m not
supposed to posit
an analogy
between the river
& my body but
courtesy of this dam
the city siphons
its water into me
another human
intervention
diverting its path
each of my cells
a little prison
the river sits in
so we’re related
on a molecular
level so intimate
I think I can say
it wants speed
& movement free
enough to jump
the strained relation
to human needs
it serves without relief
without the hands
that hold my bones
& tend my fascia
that remember
a different posture
without blockage
or pain a model
for undoing harm
done by capital
empowered to frack
during record drought
millions of gallons
of toxic wastewater
injected into earth
or kept in open ponds
prone & porous
in western counties
where river otters
have rebounded after
last being spotted
in the Allegheny
in 1899
otters are raucous
& chirp chitter
chuckle & grumble
when wrestling together
or sliding on ice
playful biophony
rivers have missed
for a whole century
like brook trout rooting
in loose cool gravel
or the plash of insects
fallen from hemlocks
the intact eastern
riverine biome
one serious mess
of sound enmeshed
in sound enmeshed
in biotic patterns
as heavy as traffic
when the weekend
weather is nice
& I ride the early
27 bus
to the Wissahickon
it’s not that I don’t like
the city it’s just if
biodiversity
is a measure of health
a city is
by definition sick
with people & built
structures crowding
out other lives
though I love signs
species persist
this sidewalk moss
probably bryum
argentum native
to guano-covered
seabird rookeries
this fertile gingko
stinking up the street
with stone fruits
crushed underfoot
this nameless fern
in a downpipe drain
so modest in scale
like the simple songs
of house sparrows
everywhere though
this chubby one
is hustling a fallen
everything bagel
of seeds & crumbs
& it’s not that I don’t
like people either
our sociality
genitals & smells
interesting diction
surprising privacies
revealed at parties
bars & in bedrooms
our genders in acts
various & wet
as thought product
of dissolved salts
washing our brains
in rich cognition
that falters without
water which can’t be
taken by the head
in the hands & held
in the hopes of healing
its body is too vast
its mind boundless
by definition
the world is awake
be careful my dears
it is the gender
that remembers
everything
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.chrysalispodcast.org
Copyright Credit: Brian Teare, "Doomstead Days" from Doomstead Days. Copyright © 2019 by Brian Teare. Reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books.
Recommended Media
Nightboat Books
Link To Complete Poem
Credits
This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and edited by Sarah Westrich and Mo Armstrong. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.chrysalispodcast.org