and the ocean. That small girl’s talking
to him about the roses and his daughter’s
birth as if she were someone else’s, and
older, all her grave words about the garden
and its growth chosen ahead of time, you
might think, to draw him out of his grief,
like Patience on kings’ graves, as we
have read, smiling extremity
out of act. Your eyes would seem
suddenly moist and half-swollen, too,
if she came towards you, looking more
alive than your daughter ever did,
with her thumb pricked by some thorn
or tine she’d touched too gently
in the garden. With her bleeding hand,
her whole body smelling of cinnamon,
or the ocean, you would not believe
— 64 —
it was your daughter telling you not
to weep in front of her, and not to
touch her either, she could
not have your help this time.
— 65 —
ix. imperative
Pericles V.i
My house is where my family and those
who admire me all meet together.
Go there, and talk about how you lost
the ones you loved, how you mourned
your losses with those of your friends
and came to find all that you had lost
awake and still breathing beside you.
Repeat all of this to them. Give it life.
Do not bother to talk about governments
or ministers, petty forms of religion
and state. Reveal everything else.
Speak about all that you craved
and all that came in its place.
Tell them that these long days
you did not stop to eat or drink,
but that you saw a vision.
— 66 —
III
DURING THE SPRING DANDELION RUSH IN IRVINE,
CALIFORNIA
after William Cowper
Men made this town. There is barely any country in it.
I’m sure that here, on the side of the road,
in the weed patch between the marine base
and the mini-mart, here, where they can’t build
because the helicopters must land safely,
you’d say there wasn’t any virtue or health
in these drifts of hedges that uproot themselves
come fall and shuffle around town as tumbleweeds.
Though some sweet bitter draught might be
what they are after, those women in the short pants,
crouched down in the brush, picking dandelions,
their black trash bags spread out beside them, catching
wind, as if they were giant snails, slagging along the fens.
The women, pink and orange edges, holding down
their hideous, inflated shells (their bags doubling as weather-
cocks, then), in their stooping, stoop low, pulling
the yellow wonders from what is merely a wonderless,
fruitless open, taking them for salads and wine.
In the evening you can see them best. Some of them
even wear reflective jackets or set lanterns at their sides.
Then the moon spins softly, sets the weeds into relief,
and the women bend, stiffened, their bags silvering,
flexed. It’s then that the clocks of the dandelions, the white
cottons that have matured or been re-sexed (useless
for vintage but the heart of next year’s crop) get sifted out.
The women, picking the meatier, yellow greens for wine,
blow the silks away. The clocks float by and shift
across the landscape as if the women had let loose stars
from the earth and flushed them out to bless the motorists.
— 69 —
The clocks, the unwanted, seedy white termagants,
bound to plant themselves again and grow more weeds
jet across the windshields of the night drivers who dart
by in their sedans, thinking they know no fatigue but idleness,
appearing to taste nothing other than what sad, dull art
provides. How this thinking subsides during the short season,
when the men and women see the clocks’ night-flashing,
the white weed curricles floating past, perhaps caught
in a wiper for a moment, scuttling along the dashboard,
snowing in the rearview mirror as they prepare to signal
and turn.
After these initial encounters, some
of the drivers actually unleash themselves, though
only usually miles later, as they sense what they have
been wanting, that arch of empire the women steal over them
in their plucking and blowing away. And they begin to ask:
how do those women travel there? And how do they stand
to bend there, crouched all day? How is it their labours pay,
or do not, for the life of the city? What cure comes
from the drink and would it be worth the expense?
And in this after-mirth or retraction, swelled
from the place we call country, the women’s act
of plucking and sifting brings public mischief, as along
the roads, the accidents happen a bit more frequently
than usual. In neighbouring towns, miles past the base,
or along the main highway, the drivers struggle to relieve
themselves from their sense of warmth and humiliation.
Life, or some hiccough in its semblance, bursts inside
of them. It happens and they brake, or their feet
give out and they feel a rushing towards a living in the land,
— 70 —
imagining themselves in orchards, picking oranges, gun-watering rows of cabbages, stretching plastic wrap
over lengths of strawberries to create a greenhouse effect,
then clutching at those dandelions, releasing their white
clocks to shiver in the night air.
There’s that release,
until they fix their vehicles or buy new ones to prove
they have survived these crashes. There’s that release,
until the winds move on and the summer drags in,
burning what’s left of the weeds.
— 71 —
A CHILD’S GARDEN
One day, in and amidst the expanse
of this garden, mine, you will ask,
markedly, assured, to plant and tend
and reap your own plot.
And there will be no question.
You will have it. It is possible you
will choose some neglected spot
in our own yard, a hill in need
of fixing. You will dig it over,
ridding the soil of earthworms,
making the dirt more difficult,
so the native plants, the sumach,
the goldenrods, and the agrimony
might prosper, flourishing again,
as they would have, once,
in their wild nativity. Or, instead,
you might make over one
of those idles by the train
tracks, near where old Enelio
puts his renegade crops,
things too human, he says,
for a proper city garden. There,
you will stake your own victory.
No doubt, at first you will plant
— 72 —
too much, a smattering of everything.
But soon you will have your
favourites. You might take up,
for instance, one of the proven methods,
using a needle to inject cold
water into the folds of your
pumpkin vi
nes, producing
a number of living giants.
From one of these boats, all
hollowed out, or from a teepee
thick-strung with provider beans,
you will run out, yourself
unstrung, to pummel
the commuter trains with crab-
apples plucked from the crab-
apple tree sprung up quick
in the corner there. A tree,
they will ask. A tree fruiting
young and profuse? Again,
you will have taken on too much
in the beginning – most gardeners do.
But with you, your excesses
are bound to pay off. In any case
it will put muscle on your shoulder,
— 73 —
this casting out your garden.
It will stand as one of your life’s
great mysteries, too, one
you will speak about for years
to come, each time, sure stopping
to tell how amidst this sure
profusion, you always stopped,
you knew, to beg the seed.
— 74 —
LAZARUS SPEAKS IN FRONT OF LEMIEUX’S
LAZARE, 1941
The first sounds were nothing new. I had grown
accustomed to my wife and those other women issuing
graveyard prayers that rang even louder than the sharp wails
they initially sacrificed and flourished whenever a letter
arrived in place of a young man or his body, as if to console.
Even then, I was no young man. Though, as you might
expect, I would have given in to the impulse to shoot
anyone trooping in on our small province in search
of an easy stab at authority, the town treasury, maybe,
or one of its finer women. That day, they could have used me, too.
The beach was full of paratroopers plunging from the smoke
their aircraft embezzled over our shore,
troopers suspended and sailing from parachutes
made from their mothers’ silk petticoats,
petticoats worn to social functions and then torn off,
just after marriage, in their fathers’ matrimonial
heats, petticoats spun by silkworms in another
country their fathers’ fathers conquered
long ago, with trade goods as arms.
From the top of that hill, I had a clear view
of the criminals shooting at our children. (For some
good reason, though I have forgotten that, too,
we bore them right up to the edges of the theatre.) Some
of my old schoolmates, in their Sunday hats
— 75 —
and zoot suits, gunned back at those intruders
with their hunting rifles. By the time I caught on,
the shooting was old. It looked as if my buddies,
firing like that, bored in their dress clothes,
meant to signal their stance against prohibition,
protection of the family swill and the right to still it,
rather than extermination in the entire. I, too,
was no saint, and it was better that they knew it.
As I rose up, I told the few mourners around me that I knew
I had died, or so it appeared, from a disease I contracted
from a foreigner during the first war. I finally succumbed,
or so I thought, to that numb death that choked up
my virility and all I was worth while my wife sat longing
for children, begging her God Almighty and the Virgin
to cure her ailment and fill her with life. I thought
it would be better if they knew all of that. Rising from my
coffin, I didn’t want them to find my coming back to life
miraculous on account of any good I had been deserving
or had done, though I did not predict much awe
about the mourners, even then. Even as I held
my head up and reached for him, the second-best father
continued with his speeches. My wife and her sister
stuck to their prayers, despite what I had just revealed
about her barrenness being mine, and the grave
— 76 —
digger was calling already for silence from me
and from the covered wagon – that procession
of men in black approaching the old church plot,
recently enlarged, from below. Apparently, the digger
wanted the father to finish the service uninterrupted.
In my leisure, then, I looked down and saw, processing,
a half-dozen of my nephews and the local undertaker, fat
astride the hearse. What strange kind of mourning,
I thought, was that? Why would a funeral procession
follow upon a burial? Did they know they were coming
to take me up rather than batten me down? Had they
brought me once but then circled the town anticipating
I might be up again and in need of an ambulance?
And the most curious: after the prayers and the burial
service died down, how was it I could hear the pastor
speaking in the church on the hill, offering
a narrative of my short life and my failed honesty,
a reference to the disease I’d been hiding in his version,
too? He assured them all how little hope there was
for mine or any other’s salvation. But still, he said,
the congregation might learn from my example, turn
to a kind of fruitful dwelling in this garden, despite
the chaos further east of us and our own sky raining
young men who were not our own, returning,
— 77 —
though some of us had our doubts. I knew then,
that the local church was still standing, blown open
but brimming with mourners half-listening to my life
drawn out in spades as little reason for personal
betterment, though as reason, still, for reform. The awe
then, was all mine. It was 1941. Even as I rose up out
of my coffin, it was not likely my funeral would stop
for me or for any other man surprised, then, to be living.
— 78 —
A NEWER WILDERNESS
There is something of the deadlies in that parallel
you made the other day, between total environmental decay
and the decline of language. It is out of character, really,
for you to make such an inadequate connection between
how we have abused world resources, how in all its wrath
of malformation and in its nuclear attitude, the earth
will beat back and thrash us with the poison we have been
feeding it for years, and how language, too, will burn out,
toxic, like our environment, dying in and among us, so
that even those words we use to name ourselves, or the most
basic human wants, will sound only as disconnected syllables
that mimic just three words after all: trash or arm or that
malady known as the hypos. As if decline would answer decline.
Least of all, you might have supposed that if the world
does come to burn, language will just become inflexible.
Its numbers or its breadth will not diminish. Our expression
will just stop changing, altogether, so that we will all
get stuck with the same accent, slinging the same slang
we have been slinging for years, the same sure words,
spoken in a singular manner, to attend to the world’s
passing, to illustrate how we are just going to die
when we eat the grasses we learned to grow, finally,
from seed, in our sprayed-over, ha
lf-glowing gardens.
But this is not it at all. Don’t you know that in and amidst
our own decline, our language will continue to build upon
itself, upon its own beauty – that suffering here, and spying
others dead, our expression will bound up and out like so
many wild, determined orchids, massing on our remains –
and amidst this profusion we will likely find more words
than we ever possibly imagined to describe what we have lost,
what, exactly, we require, and everything we cannot have?
— 79 —
THE MASTERS OF THE COUNTRY HOUSE POEMS
They are irreproachable, these poetical estates.
No amount of criticism could make them lose
their luster – fane and commonwealth, there’s never
too much nostalgia about them or for their authors either.
In most, you will observe, the air is delicate
as it travels through the rooms’ open keyholes,
swaying the unbolted doors ever so slightly. The whistling
corridors and the panelling, these are warmed only, yet,
as it stands, they are warmed entirely by the houses’
inhabitants in and after their prayers. The masters
in their verses never fail to invite the races to sit along
the lingering family tables filled and booming, here,
with flowers brought up from the local bottom.
Scads upon scads dip their bread in vinegar and oil
before taking a sip of the national beer. In these swell
places, fat is never begrudged, bullock thighs and steaks
the size of the yawning ruptures in some old miser’s
older pants are passed around. The food even appears
to multiply in front of the poor, who, in these moments,
hardly appear poor at all – though they are poor – each
kitchen providing its temporary cure of goat’s milk and kindness.
The churches close by could never give more than the masters
of these houses – the poets, I mean, not the masters proper,
but the poets who write of the giving here on these great estates,
these Penshursts and Saxhams owned by the best men
of the age, in which they once themselves were entertained.
These poets, they have understood, and their houses last.
They give and do not give. These houses, even without
their inhabitants, warm and providing, fend off heavy weather
more efficiently than anything on the market now, seeing
as they are, as has been said, the lilies of the umbrellas, the cases
— 80 —
of the turtle giants. And despite the fact that they will keep open in all seasons, or because of it, our floods are nothing
to them. Yes. As the waters rush upon us, all biblical,
A Newer Wilderness Page 5