They rise from the shoulder
Like stakes through the heart of the plain.
The tar and
sap slathered on for shelter against the heat
Heat up the
surrounding air like a desert;
That sweltering air rushes into my
lungs, charged with the smell of
Swamp and toolshed,
Axe and
chainsaw,
Cherry oak and crude.
. . .
First step up the metal rung, and the earth simmers below.
From Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem, "People":
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him....
Not people die but worlds die in them.
(Via [of all places] The Daily Howler.)
Crossing the moraine,
Forcing cold from my path:
Every saccade gives rise to a new I (a new eye)
And annihilates an old one.
what I like about the road: Every
curve and every hill bears the
promise of a beautiful vista. The
summer sun at my back like heat
from a jet engine. Junk
farms and John Deeres line the route
as in a storyboard, and
hay cylinders wind round and round
like crescent rolls.
The backbeat of the stereo
measures feet and inches across
landscapes of rock and pine and plain.
You pass a hog or a Chevy Belair as
two-blink towns become four-blink
towns due to stale road work signs. My
sun-blown skin starts to match the
ferric canyon rock, my eyes
reflecting the blue waters, reflecting
them in turn.
. . .
Out here you see beauty for which
there is no metaphor: Sylvan
hills and idyll skies, the odd
abandoned wooden shack
surrendering itself to its ineluctable
return to the earth, like these
massive conifers that created
meaning both in their growing forth
and in their going back; a chorus of
stones sings an ode to the gloaming of
their glowing, stars of the earth
nested in a sky of felted greens and
clay-grit reds.
Against this reality,
The Forms are an
imperfect, shadowy reflection,
the gods hapless
confectioneers, bringers of war and
jollity at best; Hubble sees nothing
grander than these glowing-auburn
clouds of burned hydrogen that
garnish the hilltops of the Montana
badlands, the bonus of
unmediated perception. ("Superior"
to the reconstituted colors from the furthest regions of our cosmos? I
don't know. But surely more "poetic.")
The poets down here are swindlers:
stealing bits of language
from other poets (who stole before them)
or (what's worse) from experience--
as if its best use were as grist for verse;
as if words were half as numinous
as the mysterious reality they would map and metonymize.
UPDATE [1.25.2008]: This article in the National Post about Arnold Schoenberg (via Arts & Letters Daily) expresses a somewhat related concern of his: "[I]nstead of being pleased with having a few bona fide masterpieces under his belt, Schoenberg was often depressed, complaining that his music was derivative of the human condition...."
Dark night, star-lit weed fields
lining this road
somewhere between Lusk and Denver.
Tristan blaring in the headphones
(the only way to hear
the orchestral pianissimo
over our Ford's forte drone): probably not what Wagner had in mind.
But hell--it works: the road seems both to rise and fall at the same time.
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