Child of Nature
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs.
—William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”
Maybe seven years: or, if not, some length
Of time like that has come and gone. I hear
Them in my head, in the clear mountain-springs
I left behind when I returned again
To my hometown, New York, its steel cliffs
Sag-glassed and star-stunned in the weak impress
Of sunlight and solitude. Years connect
And disconnect me. The winter-sharp sky
And the cold comfort of a cloud in repose
In it that, once seen, vanishes from view
As nature imagines the orchard-tufts
That cloud has passed over, the haloed fruits
The sun and moon steal at dawn for themselves
Before the day starts and the talking heads see
Emerging from their foxholes practiced lines
On the sanctity of God and Christ, farms,
The Investor, the glory of coal smoke,
And the movement we need swinging from trees.
Having let be be my center of seem,
I spent a year and a half in the woods
Culling from those cold mountaintops the next fire,
Feeling infinite, and alone.
What forms
First: a thing or its form? The I or me?
The maker or the thinker? A bird’s-eye
View of the life, what Arnold called the din
Of strife, a little like Floyd’s “Us and Them,”
Soothed the doom of numb Zoom rooms. But what sweet
Prison’s not still a prison? What kind heart
Isn’t bathed in blood? What mind doesn’t mind
Being the mind’s second act? I was too
Abstract for the Berkshire snowfall, perhaps,
Which day by day flared out like influence
From a concrete dream about abstract life.
The idea being that great nature acts
On all living things in a way we trust,
Or must learn to have faith in; that it is a gift
For the soul of the lingering childmood
In all of us, and makes all mystery
Answerable, all weight bearable weight,
Forty tons of green sighs in a blue world
That wait for an apt word in an apt mood,
Blessed, blue-green, and serene, the mind put on
A pedestal centered in a gold frame
And hung on a sun-warmed wall. But my blood
Circuits the outlines of skylines asleep,
Unwept, and unsung that way. My soul
Has grown from a Bronx tenement’s power.
My Old Testament: a corner store’s joy
At being part of the life of things.
This,
As the kids say: facts. Often not oft
Kept me from turning soft, and all the shapes
Of nature turned in on themselves. No stir
Of air was there but for cityworld,
Where nature, in seeing me, cut its heart
Out while singing my country tis of thee
And vamped those vaulted buildings into woods,
Mountains, and streams. My country tis of thee.
But now when I think of that lost thought,
Somehow found here in the sudden and faint
Power of sacred songs, perplexity
Sidles in with the setting sun again.
I see the blue sky whiten then brown, sense
John and Paul sharing a spliff and some blurred thoughts
About diminished seventh chords or food
In a small, smoke-soaked hotel room, and hope
One day to finally figure out first
And foremost if this is nature. Roe
On mountains, whistling quail, the burned sides
Of a flowering Rowan tree, green streams
Like on the old maps of the world where man
Painted water olive or jade. No one
Would mistake any of these, now or then,
For something unnatural. There were days
When I was a child when I would walk by
Storefronts tattooed with graffiti, the paint
Still fresh from the can, the tart cataract
Of aerosols clouding the mind, a rock
Through the veined window, a pale mash of wood
From a smashed guitar splintered like hay, “Me
So Horny” oozing from some boombox love
Stowed away from sight, and a lucky charm
Left on the doorknob and of interest
To no one but Tanya, who’d just walked past,
Stopped, turned back, took it, and said, Got one more
For my collection, yeah boy! What was this
If not one of nature’s many strange gifts?
Or, is nature only what you believe
When you read? The hill-and-dale flex I learned?
The “Fern Hill” flex I learned alone and, hour
After hour, finding it oftentimes
Pure musical reflex, humanity
Responding in song to the strange power
Of an environment enhanced and felt,
Finally, instead of simply seen, joy
Inching along the cracks of the sublime,
Like the music of a glass interfused
With the life of all people, all stars, suns,
And the sounds of it all shattering air
Before the glass itself shatters. Oh man,
I grew tired of whatever impels
Nature to always be elsewhere, and thought:
Listen, yes, I have trees and rivers still,
Yes, I have gardens and ponds, I have woods,
I have a romantic park that was (behold!)
Once Seneca Village razed from the world.
I’ve had these things and what they half create,
Which is just half of what I recognize
And welcome as nature in its own sense.
For all park is policy, all verse is nurse,
Every habitat a cradle for the soul.
At least for the time being.
Or perchance
There are words, like “perchance,” that function more
Or less like what I meant to say, decay
Being part of the process, faint cloudbanks
Frothing then finished by the wind, part-friend
Part-foe of what the mind sets out to catch
Whenever and wherever it can, read
Or listened to under sun or streetlights.
I, too, crave a bright ocean meadow while
The sun braids the green with its warm gold. Once,
This seemed the only way to be and make
A natural world. But I can’t betray
Where I’m from. I don’t want that privilege.
That doesn’t mean neighborhoods sprayed in lead
Are like emerald meadows that inform
And reassure naturally, impress
Love onto the heart naturally, feed
Naturally on nature’s summer-tinged tongues
Of chartreuse verbs gifted to the human,
But what exists between them is both all
There is and nothing at all, like life
Grown out of the fiction of poems. Disturb
What cannot be disturbed, and then behold
As it awakens and sings to the moon
In the late morning haze. This is the walk,
The long walk, from which I have emerged free
At last, after a journey of light years
Across a field of dead ideas matured
To life for their own sake, free in my mind,
Finally, to remember all the forms
Of my life enhanced by this dwelling-place,
Its hard-edged abracadabra, heathen
Sunday mornings, and phosphorescent grief.
No one is ever alone with their thoughts.
Alone on a cliff or here beside me,
We are crowded by presence and perchance
Where listening to stream and street we hear
The other, even as one of them gleams,
And the other gleams we can’t forget
One or the other; ethereal stream
And electric street are parts of the same long
Link in the same human chain. I came
To this poem, the long one, with a lot to say.
I’d sung my art before this with real zeal,
Chanting through three moods so as not to forget:
The ground, then heaven, then the weapon. Years
Passed. And now from my high window, the cliffs
And canyons of these avenues call me
Back to sing through fire for their sweet sake.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2023)