On Transpiration by Meredith Macleod Davidson

by Tyler Truman Julian

Meredith Macleod Davidson’s Transpiration is haunted, and like the best ghost stories, it is unclear if the haunting is real—complete with bumps in the night—or if it is the psyche’s attempt to grapple with past pain. Transpiration is a microchap that explores how an individual carries environmental and personal trauma with them across time and space. The ghosts may not be real in the supernatural sense, but their presence influences how one views the world and moves in it.

The microchap opens with “Deltaville,” chronicling a return home, in which a sense of unease—images of storms, metaphors of rot and gothic tone and diction—permeates each description, even as “not much [has] changed” in the speaker’s absence. “I taught my mother about // underground mushroom networks yesterday,” Davidson’s speaker explains in “Deltaville.” Her mother

wanted to know if you could use ‘mycelium networks’
to describe other entanglements. I want to know

when I come back to the water, will the river still ripple
at height, will there still be birds?

The poem begs the reader to reflect on “entanglements,” the decay that accumulates amid personal relationships and how it impacts one’s interactions with the world. As if in reply, Davidson writes, “We are at the end of everything...Someone always inherits / the apocalypse exposed in their hands” (“Rinse Cycle”). This is a collection that encourages us to interrogate how the intangible things we inherit from place and kin shape us. Davidson’s speaker attempts to make sense of this question, yet the poems of Transpiration maintain a bleak tone, implying one may never be able to escape that haunted inheritance and suggest that all that can be done is to allow time to salve the pain and to build resilience in the face of a grief that never truly dissolves.

The last several poems of the microchap angle upward, employing a hopeful tone, indicating growth amid hurt is possible. In the whimsically-titled “Orca are wearing salmon hats again,” the speaker emphasizes the power of time:

            in the depths where the sun’s rays do not range,
            the light unable to project itself far enough for a creature
            to sparkle. To shine! I reached through the darkness

            of memory and found my loved ones
            harder to see. I was sick with time and
            the ways it takes them father from me.

            An alarm sounded and all my dreams
           fled. I got on with Wednesday, in age-
            old fashion. We are all capable

            of extraordinary journeys.
            To say, everything comes back
            around, eventually.

It takes conscious effort to acutely observe past pain such as deaths and breakups; however, looking at this pain can bring about various responses—particularly grief and nostalgia. Though, as the speaker wavers between grief and nostalgia, she is gazing at these memories with more-or-less clear eyes. The microchap closes with “Letter to blank in Montezuma County” and tells how the speaker drove through an old lover’s town but didn’t let them know about their proximity. Davidson’s speaker declares,

                                                            I’m still undoing
            all the damage we’d done to each other. Undoing
            the damage I did to myself, long before. My love
            hosted elsewhere and I’m shining a light on it,
            demanding it show itself for what it is.
            The morning I drove away from Colorado,
            I climbed a mesa and studied the morning
            dappling the long grasses, gold rock, and
            mottled snow. Birds circled higher than
            oxygen; I found the deer hidden in the
            expanse. The dirt crisp beneath my boots—
            that crunch that sounds artificially clear.
            So many mesas I crested that day. Knowing
            I was close to you, but with no desire
            to rejoin.

The speaker’s growth, while incomplete (i.e. “still undoing”), is significant (i.e. “So many mesas”) and shows a resilience the reader would do well to imitate.

The haunting of Transpiration is more psychological than supernatural and resonates as relevant to any reader. The microchap’s sedative and moody atmosphere make it an ideal read for the first weeks of fall; yet, in its pages the reader will find more than that—notably, an emotional arc that is, above all, relatable. There is troubling beauty in this short collection, and Transpiration is a pleasure to read.

In case you missed it—check out Meredith Macleod Davidson’s poem in ISSUE 22 of The Shore