Fields/Meadows

In our previous blog, we considered a poem-pair where the action takes place on the inside: in an airport, in an airplane, in a room. It's time to move out-of-doors.

Rodney Jones' poem Ground Sense opens with a sly line break: instead of divulging his intimacies with women, the speaker subverts our expectations and moves to a deeper level of understanding:

      Because I have known many women
      Who are dead, I try to think of fields
      As holy places. Whether we plow them

     Or let them to weeds and sunlight,
     Those are the best places for grief,
     If only that they perform the peace

     We come to . . .

Fields, meadows, woods: they provide a venue of understanding--but not for everyone:

      . . . except as my
     Friend’s wife begins to disappear,
     He feels no solvent in all the earth

Yet in comparison, the speaker feels like an "amateur at grief":
     
     Walking the creek behind the house,
      I cross to the old homeplace, find

     A scattering of chimney rocks, the

     Seeds my grandfather watered, the
     Human lifetime of middle-aged trees.

Though published in 1973, Robert Duncan's poem Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow has an older feel to it: we find words like therein and wherefrom, and phrases like

      whose secret we see in a children's game
      of ring a round of roses told.

Some of the references feel archaic, as though from a tale of King Arthur:

     Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
      I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
     whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

     She it is Queen Under The Hill

     whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
     that is a field folded.

What feels like a certain verbal clunkiness perhaps belies a geniuneness of feeling.

Even the title of the poem invites comment: Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. Not "Often I Return to a Meadow": instead, the speaker seems to say that he sometimes has the ability to attain the transcendence of experience which the meadow encapsulates:

     Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
     as if it were a given property of the mind
     that certain bounds hold against chaos,

     that is a place of first permission,

     everlasting omen of what is.
 

       Ground Sense (Rodney Jones)  

Because I have known many women

Who are dead, I try to think of fields
As holy places. Whether we plow them

Or let them to weeds and sunlight,

Those are the best places for grief,
If only that they perform the peace

We come to, the feeling without fingers,
The hearing without ears, the seeing
Without eyes. Isn’t heaven just this

Unbearable presence under leaves?

I had thought so. I had believed
At times in a meadow and at other

Times in a wood where we’d emerge

No longer ourselves, but reduced
To many small things that we could

Not presume to know, except as my
Friend’s wife begins to disappear,
He feels no solvent in all the earth,

And me, far off, still amateur at grief.

Walking the creek behind the house,
I cross to the old homeplace, find

A scattering of chimney rocks, the
Seeds my grandfather watered, the
Human lifetime of middle-aged trees.

  (from Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems 1985-2005, page 123: Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, NY © 2006)

      Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow (Robert Duncan)

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded. It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun's going down whose secret we see in a children's game of ring a round of roses told. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.         (from The Opening of the Field, page 7:  New Directions Paperback, New York, NY © 1973)