But What Comes First Is Wonder

A reading of "Rabbitbrush" by Molly McCully Brown

I should be afraid
to be so unprepared: herdless
human

Molly McCully Brown is considered a local poet in my Central Virginia town. All of her writing is gorgeous. Much of it touches on disability, though it isn’t always about that, if you know what I mean. Following her on social media (unapologetic), I know that she has recently relocated from her professorship at a coastal Virginia college to direct the creative writing program at the University of Wyoming. This poem, “Rabbitbrush,” touches on that change of place, but the meanings run so much deeper.

Having read her essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body, I understand her ambivalent relationship with her physical capacities, living in the ever-shifting tension between what her body can and cannot do. Having a sometimes-disabling physical condition myself, her words arrive to me with an empathy, a sister understanding. (Do you catch my breathlessness in the first half of the video? That’s because I walked up a flight of stairs before sitting down to read. I talk about my cardiovascular condition—POTS—in a chapter of my memoir-in-progress, and I also talk about how some of Brown’s essay have given me a better lens on my own body’s (in)capacities.

But this poem is also about words, and wonder, and place, and the way language makes us more grounded in the places where we find ourselves. That central anecdote of being told by a neighbor that the “undergrowth thatching the slope” is named rabbitbrush, and the word becomes the title. This poem is about naming, or about knowing names. Knowing a place. Or being less afraid in an unknown place because you can name something within it.

Or it’s about how wonder wins over fear. I like that that reading best.

But what
comes first is wonder
at the word, at having woken
someplace new.

Image of Rabbitbrush / Credit: Alex York, Unsplash

RESOURCES:

I found Brown’s poem in the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by former poet laureate Ada Limon.

Books I recommend by Molly McCully Brown:

Places I’ve Taken My Body (prose)

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (poetry)

In The Field Between Us (poetry, with Susannah Nevison)

Other writings of hers are listed here: Poems & Essays — Molly McCully Brown

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