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, theHuman 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 fieldsAs 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 believedAt times in a meadow and at other
Times in a wood where we’d emerge
No longer ourselves, but reducedTo 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)
(from The Opening of the Field, page 7: New Directions Paperback, New York, NY © 1973) |
| |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment