A given terrain can reflect not only the physical particulars of the natural world but also the poet's response to those particulars. In Christian Wiman's "One Time," the speaker focuses on "a lovely cut/of a missing river," fissures, "the slickrock whorls." But these are not neutral observations: we find word-choices such as the following (italics mine -- JK):
. . . the yucca’s stricken
clench, and, on the other side,
the dozen buzzards swirled and buoyed
above some terrible intangible fire
that must scald the very heart
of matter to cast up such avid ash.
And the speaker is not merely present at the scene: he finds himself there after an earlier unspecified event, discovering now
. . . a clarity
of which my eyes were not yet capable . . .
To believe is to believe you have been torn
from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.
I come back to the world. I come back
to the world and would speak of it plainly . . .
The speaker's life has been transformed by that prior harrowing experience (illness?), and through the natural particulars currently in front of him, he comes to acknowledge that he is a survivor.
W.S. Merwin's "Low Fields and Light" is a quieter response to the natural world than Wiman's poem, but is no less vivid. Where Wiman's speaker experiences a canyon terrain today, Merwin's speaker is struck by a landscape recalled over many years. The uncanny power of memory lends a vibrancy to the current scene and its supposed ordinariness:
But you would think the fields were something
To me, so long I stare out, looking
For their shapes or shadows through the matted gleam, seeing
Neither what is nor what was, but the flat light rising.
One might propose the equation "inner terrain reflects the outer terrain." But that would be too facile. The real magic arises in how the poet deftly merges an image from the natural world with a heightened sense of language.
One Time (Christian Wiman)
1.
Then I looked down into a lovely cut
of a missing river, something underdusk’s upflooding shadows
claiming for itself a clarity
of which my eyes were not yet capable:
fissures could be footpaths, ancient homes
random erosions; pictographs depicting fealties
of who knows what hearts, to who knows what gods.
To believe is to believe you have been torn
from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.
I come back to the world. I come back
to the world and would speak of it plainly,
with only so much artifice as words
themselves require, only so much distance
as my own eyes impose
On the slickrock whorls of the real
canyon, the yucca’s stricken
clench, and, on the other side,
the dozen buzzards swirled and buoyed
above some terrible intangible fire
that must scald the very heart
of matter to cast up such avid ash.
(from Every Riven Thing, pages 27-28, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, NY © 2010)
Low Fields and Light (W.S. Merwin)
Like a gray blade set to the moon's roundness,
Like a plain of glass touching all there is.
The flat fields run out to the sea there.
There is no sand, no line. It is autumn.The bare fields, dark between fences, run
Out to the idle gleam of the flat water.
And the fences go on out, sinking slowly,
With a cow-bird half-way, on a stunted post, watchingHow the light slides through them easy as weeds
Or wind, slides over them away out near the sky.
Because even a bird can remember
The fields that were there before the slow
Spread and wash of the edging line crawled
There and covered them, a little more each year.
My father never ploughed there, nor my mother
Waited, and never knowingly I stood there
Hearing the seepage slow as growth, nor knew
When the taste of salt took over the ground.
But you would think the fields were something
To me, so long I stare out, lookingFor their shapes or shadows through the matted gleam, seeing
Neither what is nor what was, but the flat light rising.
(from Selected Poems, page 44, Atheneum, New York, NY © 1988)
