Beech Forest

Light from the ugliest lamp I ever saw, here

on the table that triples for reading, eating (can’t say

dining), business on the phone; ugliest except

a few around the corner in that guest house at windows

—plaster driftwood; cylinders like rockets or sanitary

napkins propping shades; thin torso of a youth;

red globe on orange globe, the works, somebody’s

collection. Wouldn’t she love this one, lump of lamp base

intending landscape, two donkeys in mustard glaze,

heads ruefully down, one carrying two rush panniers

large enough to hold your pens or salts and peppers; on

the other a shifty man with droopy moustache rides,

grumping under his sombrero; right leg broken

off at the knee, left leg clipped at ankle. They make

no progress, this mold-made work—the joins, arthritic

ridges where dabs of grayish green suggest

a wizened bush from which a brass post rises

to hold a shade that doesn’t fit and twice

has tried to burn, as crusty sores at the rim show.

Still, it lights my work. Why hate it? Do I care?

These indecorous furnishings stand for failure, are

a clutter that weighs down, defeats the purpose,

like dumbbells taken along on vacations; the pen jar;

lamp base, sextant, portable folding triptych.

The writing table fills with clutter. Specials

coax me to nudge buying into play. A checkout

coupon lets me get some brand of lunch meats

fifty-five cents off if I spend two dollars

but I just can’t find it when I’m shopping, the ticket—

with its rubric of good news and inscrutable forest

of bar code, black on red—to lead me on; back home

there it is, on the table, laying waste my power to spend.

What I have wanted (with Larkin) to do must be

“essentially undoable, it belongs to the imagination.”

Rather, the demolition has begun, piss and shit

and blood mix in the snow-white bowl; and yet

I find the Beech Forest (behind the beach

dunes) that Allen recommended “without

reservation.” The man was right—it more

than satisfies, these beech ponds and their dune

forest. I sat on a pitch pine that had blown

over and then turned round and risen again,

and bowed part making a seat something like

a saddle; the tree was growing while I sat on it

as were the other pitch pines round the pond ruddy

in afternoon, late light of day, rough trunks

with tufts of twisted branches green with needles,

it was idyllic, wind speaking through the pines,

solitude:—O, yes, two high-breasted girls

came striding by, I heard them coming, I

heard them going, yammering at full volume

not looking left or right, they passed me, were

out of sight and soon of earshot, Doppler effect

caused by exuberant youth in oblivious chitchat.

And people are smoking in these dry woods too,

not policing their butts is how I know,

the butts will surface from the heavier, sifting sand,

sand spilling, surfing down hills, crashing in waves

over the path here. But call it solitude,

when a thought—but wait! I thought—I should not be

having a thought here, this moment: yet a vision

of a Chinese poet in his study overlooking

such a pond as this arrives out of the silence

like the yellow water lilies on the water, pads

spreading out in files like a design on the broadloom

of a lobby. The sage is working on a poem, brushing it

on silk, inspired by a blend of Tao and

Confucius. Doubtless he would not forget

allusions to Sung poets, if he were not

a Sung poet himself, in which case he would have to

echo Han or T’ang; and he would be writing

of solitude; time passing; absent friends

(enlightenment would have to be inferred).

No matter, I didn’t bring a pen today.

However, over there are inkberry bushes, so

with a reed I just might make a start. . . . Farther

on the path I listen to a bird, a warbler perhaps,

I do not know the song or see the bird.

There with the pines and sand and birdsong, and no

prayer- or guide- or selfhelp-book, no

serious commune, the mind must yearn to be

led on; it wants a deity, an altar to approach;

an altar at least to take steps toward; occasion

to rise to—with nothing planned for the mind,

it’s like a person suddenly blind, not blind

for a long time and knowing the ropes, but just

now, rope-stung, blind—and groping, feeling around

for the way, any way, or, closer to home,

when the power goes at night just getting from

here to there even though you know the drill,

—you never find the batteries when you need them,

groping down cellar for the circuit breaker then

you flip it; nothing, it’s a bigger failure you are part of—

know the layout in general yet without ceremony

the mind leans forward, over an edge, hoping for,

needing a little ritual, like a guide rail to keep it

from falling, going down. Even then the mind

finds need of other news, keeps on desiring

alterity somewhere at hand. For example,

walking the streets of Provincetown, nothing to see

but lots to look at, all that fluff and buff,

the Michelin-man day-trippers aching along;

suddenly I want a prayer book, maybe not

Bottles and Stools or The Little Red Book but still . . .

even a pocket copy of A Shropshire Lad,

such as I find soon after all the buff and fluff

at Tim’s, the only bookstore on the street,

handy for quick reads. Thin as a shortbread biscuit,

THE RICHARDS PRESS LONDON 1915, no doubt

with its khaki cover, intended for some Tommy’s

backpack, a backward solace for off-duty hours

in the trenches: admittedly not very much

on the other hand just the thing I’m talking after;

a talisman perhaps is all, an amulet

with words that say, buck up, come on, you’ll make it,

there’s something on after all this, no matter

what the words say. Housman’s “vision,” his drear

anguish of love for someone, something, lad

and landscape that never were, that might shoot threads

of gold among the bloody muslins and the mud;

mind wants other news than what the ruffled senses

bring data of—smoke or flesh or birdsong.

It saw there was a space within, reserved

for turning toward another; other; that

no bullet, arrowwood or beach plum might

fill, though these could occupy that space

a moment.

Again I heard the casual chirping

of that bird, off in that tupelo, the song

I did not know, below the cries of gull

and jay I did. The unknown I saw was not

enough to satisfy; or—satisfied when it

was framed, complement of what is known for sure.

It’s—like—when you go someplace strange, new,

the seashore, any boundary, you want to learn the names

of plants. Start looking at the edges of leaves. It gives

a grip on where you are, and who, or seems to,

to know bullbrier, bearberry, blueberry. You get a GUIDE

or a local to tell. On the dune path I found one, a gnarled

bush alone, hollylike but succulent leaf; nothing

like it in the book. But why feel helped in nature

by a name? When a horde of flower children wanted

to know what they should do to be saved (back when)

Snyder told them, “learn the names of plants;

of animals; learn to do something with your hands.”

Well I went out to that dune again: to cop a copy

of the leaf I took and lost: so it’s only bayberry

after all; dioecious, two-sexed: some leaves different

from others, that’s OK only one got pictured

in my book; but the waxiness, bayberry for sure, set

to be rendered into candles for a gifte shoppe,

nauseating noose of “scents.” Its nutlets twinkle

near the oily leaves aglow above the sand,

bone white. Doesn’t make me feel better to know now

about that scrawny straggler. Sanctimonious

pilgrim know-alls, Bradford & Co.! Forest

into desert, just like that. No time flat, considering.

Source: Surface Impressions: A Poem (Louisiana State University Press, 2002)