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The Earth is Saying Down in the Dark On Wingaersheek Beach Main poetry page Poems from The Land of Milk and Honey |
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The Earth is Saying Roots and rocks emerge from the forest path like half-spoken thoughts, or as Thoreau would put it, the earth is saying "rock." And saying "root," too, and tiny bright red mushrooms and green moss worn smooth like a poem one's fingered for years. Bedraggled cat-tails, a few yellow, early-fallen leaves, but summer lingers--the scented air is warm and spangled with sun- lit motes. Roots make earthen steps, but here, where my favorite tree stands like the pine tree in a Japanese poem, roots multiply, so that I need to walk with care on the uneven earth. But I need to get near this tree, I need it for a poem, recycled from the Japanese. As I walk, I need my thoughts to take in the rocks and roots, those thoughts still half-spoken by the earth. But this is silly--I am old enough to know that neither the earth nor the sun thinks, or cares what I think, or needs to be put in a poem. Nor does a tree. It is presumption to think this, or think that to be old, and to walk in the fall woods and say that the earth is uttering rocks is all right, because one is a poet. Nor will it do to think about one's age in the fall woods, or write poems about leaves turning, hair and seasons turning, etc. There is no need for a poem like that--it has been done already by plenty of other poets. Even the pine, looking so Japanese here by the pond where yellow leaves fall and float and lily pads like green plates serve up their white blooms--this tree, so poetic, has no wish to be recycled into something that is only a thought and not a living thing rooted in the earth while all its needles shine in the sun. So, like the woodman in the old poem, I'll spare that tree and let the sun- shine fall wordless on the still pond and the golden needles fallen on the earth. I'll walk without thinking and just look at the roots as they spring from the earth and the rocks that are stuck there forever like stubborn, half-spoken thoughts. Re-cycling is for cans and jars. I'll let the woods surround my thoughts, but not enter them. I'll pocket no leaf or red mushroom to prompt my need to write poems, although it's a true proverb: "There's nothing new under the sun," and poets have long walked in the yellow woods and felt how the fall sun was warm, but not quite like summer, and seen leaves falling and had a thought or two about getting old and how everything recycles. And if I need to root around and find a tree for a poem, who's to say "no"? The earth? The rocks? Down in the Dark After three days of equinoctial rain, I fall asleep to sounds of geese leaving and dream right back to nineteen forty-nine, the old house on Ashland Avenue, the basement. The windows, high above my head, are filled with snow. The furnace is humming a grumbly song, leaking a square of firelight around its iron door. At the dim edge of the light-bulb's circle, Mason jars gleam in rows--tomatoes, onions, peas, beans, cauliflower, peaches. Bright as the Christmas balls boxed and waiting in the attic, each jar sits wax-sealed and dreaming, remembering sun, roots, rain. They make me think of my mother, bending over her hoe, then over the steaming stove, boiling down summer to keep us all going in the cold. Outside, each puddle or pond is sealed with ice. But down here, behind the lines of laundry dried by the furnace's secret sun, I find two round wooden tubs where wintering goldfish swim. Orange, tomato-red, peach, white, and pinto, they flick and weave within the glassy water. These fish live in Grandma's base- ment, not in ours. But this is a dream, and I kneel by the tubs and watch fish go round and round, dreaming of their rock- lined pool, the roof of water lilies, the dragonflies dipping to their kiss. I'm six. I know that fish are cold clear through, but I have a furnace inside me. It throbs like the big one, that en- gine hauling the house toward Christmas. Then comes my birthday, then Valentine's Day and Easter. Then summer--bare feet, hide and seek, peaches, tomatoes, and gold- fish in Grandma's pool. I'll be seven and half then. I see, for the first time, that I have a brain that can think all this and still be here in winter, in the basement. I can keep it down inside me, like secrets. I can hear autumn rain, half-waking, and still see the high, snow-filled windows, the bright jars, the laundry, the furnace, the fish... On Wingaersheek Beach August, 1996 She walks into the ocean, like a turtle leaving eggs safe in sand, above tide- line. But the cold shocks her legs to a stop. Waves gnaw her shins and chew the sand she stands on. They tug toward the smooth deeps that breathe up and down without breaking. She leans back, away from the ice-white daytime moon. She is through with its ebbs and flows now, won't dance to its tune. High on the beach, behind her, her daughter lies side- by-side with her tan young man. She has cramps, poor girl; she won't go near the water, but will turn each oiled surface sunward and brown all day, a brochette tenderized to his taste. The mother, meanwhile, stands like a post in the shallows. Splashing kids dash past her and toddlers stagger after sanderlings. She sees nothing that needs her--while the mothers of young ones caw their anxiety like sea gull cries, she is free to swim as she pleases. She stands, still. She is afraid. The near future holds a change she knows by heart-- the freezing plunge, the panicky, fast strokes. And then the bliss, exhilaration, love beyond measure of one's own warm core. The mem- ory's clear, but she does not believe. A year ago, the last time, she was younger. Yelling kids can tease the literal surf and dance in its teeth. She, cursed with learning, is stuck in Shelley's ocean, in Crane's, in the cruel sea of ballads flailing the sand with tattered tragedies. Gulls call, "Beware! The waves take heat and breath, change you, at best, to a fish, or a seal on gray rocks, gray muzzle turned toward shore, where your daughter will pace and cry." "Nonsense," she answers, the turned tide rising to knee, to thigh. She need only decide, she decides. She doesn't move. |