Rivendell
from The Forest and The Trees:
Four Seasons From a Journal About Place and Poetry
Wesley McNair
All spring the tree that inspires me most is the dead elm my dogs and I pass on our daily walk. It is so tall not even the vines that climb its sides each spring can reach its highest branches; yet they go as high as they're able, decorating it with a lovely, green lace. From the castoffs of weed and decay, this surprising elegance.
Listen to northern New Englanders explain the location of a house, gravel pit or pond, and you will eventually hear the expression "over in there," or "down in there," as in: "Stay on the main road until you come to a general store on the left, then take your next right. Their summer camp is down in there." Thus does the landscape of forest, hills and hollows make its way into native speech.
Kinnell, Oliver, and Kumin have all written poems about picking and eating wild blackberries in a New England August, but no one has written of the leisurely talk which goes on in the blackberry patch and is partly why one goes there, taking a family member or friend along for the purpose. "Good pickin'," somebody says far off in the patch, and "They're loaded today." Nearer by, a woman tells of all the quarts she put up last year, and her companion tells about the blackberry cobbler she will make for her grown son. Then they recall picking, good and bad, in other patches and other seasons. Hearing such voices as they drift across the bushes, one could be in heaven--God, listening to each innoncent reflection, and to each affectionate joke: the man's voice asking his wife stuck in the briars, "Who's winnin'--you or the thorns?"; the woman threatening to bake him a "green pie."
September. The leaves in the surrounding forest begin to turn, and the ache inside comes back, that yearning for more of it, for fall to tear one open with its fierce oranges and blood reds, to carry one off in October winds, and November rains.
On a frozen weekend in February, William Stafford stays with me and my wife Diane between readings, bringing great warmth to our house. After he leaves I find this poem on his pillow, left as a gift--a poem another poet might have saved for publication, though for Stafford, the pleasure the poem would give us was publication enough.
McNair's Place Because it is Maine, snow still lingers till its own good time in reticent places or turns its face in shadow away, and any farm stays only partly yours, retaining its Indian posture, no matter what century it is. Even towns have a habit of straggling off rough at the edges and allowing old barns to hang around leaning along Maine Street reminiscing with stands of woodbine and popple and wild grape. What sheriff could arrest a land like this when the red stars come out to patrol the dark? Snow backs off, streetlights hold still; out there in a surge of trees, galloping hills escape all the time where our country belongs to the world and knows no law, no owner, no state.
"Nature's first green is gold," says Robert Frost, referring, perhaps, to that yellow fuzz one sees in trees that are just budding and leafing out in the springtime of northern New England after a long winter. Yet for the maple tree, the first green is brown--a russet which, one discovers on closer view, belongs to tiny leaves in the exact shape they will always have, astonishing as a baby's hand. Without the brown of maples in the forest, we would not see the yellow of birch and poplar half so well. Their brown sets the contrast that makes visible not only nature's gold, but the whole spectrum of early green in the trees coming back to life each May in northern New England.
A Mercer neighbor, Denis Culley, tells me about a horse--his old work horse and friend, Dick. For some time now, the old-timers in our town have been advising him to get Dick a mate. "A horse gets lonely without one," they all say. Unable to afford another horse, Denis now goes out to the pasture on spring and summer nights after the work is done to stand quietly beside his horse. Of all the love stories I've ever heard, this is one of the most moving.
How beautiful is the texture of talk on summer nights when we sit with friends on porches or, as I did last night, on the back lawn in deck chairs under the trees. Its intimacy and directness reminds me of James Carse's description of talk in The Silence of God, "To speak from your heart is to receive the listener into your heart." One often hearts that the modern age has abandoned poetry; yet communicating in this way, we are almost speaking poetry. How, then, have we abandoned it?
The poet does not believe in miracles, but in mysteries.
According to Bei Dao, the Chinese poet and dissident, it is important for any poet to have a small group with whom he can share his secrets. So saying, he suggests a definition of poetry as a code which, shared with others, gives special knowledge and power to the sharers and the poet alike. It is a definition shaped by his life under political oppression, and it reminds us of the capacity poetry has to change us and our world.
Trees again. On a November drive shortly after moving from New Hampshire to Maine several autumns ago, my homesick wife Diane began to cry about the "friends" that had been taken from her. When she dried her eyes and I got her to talk about her grief, I discovered it wasn't people she meant, but the great, old maples that had stood at the edges of our property and our lives for fifteen years.
On CNN's "Headline News," of all places, a Buddhist turns up to speak about suffering, and then gratitude. Gratitude is rare among Americans, he says, because in a capitalist culture, people are conditioned to want and get, so receiving is what is supposed to happen. In fact, we are never fully satisfied with what we receive and only want more. Unable to know gratitude, the Buddhist explains, we remain spiritually childish.
But gratitude exists. This January, from the front window of our house in Maine, Diane and I watch snow coming to rest on the distant trees around our property, which seem suddenly enormous, as if the snowfall had made them grow. One has a low branch with twists in it like a dozen elbows. Another has three small branches that open at the very top, making a tiny tree. Our new friends.
Another spring, and I have just read Philip Booth's musings about the cost of "whatever trees were felled" for catalogs that come in the mail from the retailers. I, too, am troubled by this. Yet I am also troubled by the combination of hurt and resignation I see in the face of Clayton Brann when he tells me during his annual spring delivery of firewood to my house that the recession has stopped the production of catalogs and newspaper inserts. Clayton is a simple and unschooled man who would have difficulty replacing his work in the woods. "You wouldn't think a little thing like that could affect a man's living," he says. "But it does."
Place is not only a noun but a verb; one cannot come to know it without locating oneself in it, a slow and interior process. Looking out my window in one more October as I write this, I see blowing and falling leaves whose altered color is so familiar I have not looked closely at them until now. They are part of me, together with the damp chill from last night's rain I experience though I am indoors, all carrying a feeling that belongs to this season and no other. What have I learned that I didn't know I knew from autumn--its bright warmth against the cold, its whirling change against the skeletons of trees--what but that the world is two things at once: a surface and an underneath, a source of celebration and of sorrow, a yearning and a giving in, life that goes on and death that takes it away.
The place where I live, how wild it is. This weekend I fly over it with a friend in his small airplane and find nothing but forest all the way to the horizon; yet on the ground in my Maine town I hardly notice the surrounding trees, they seem so far from houses and roads. Now when I see deer entering our fields or a moose stumbling across a sidestreet, I will understand they know my region as it really is: a continuous underworld of green, opening into a dream of light.
After a fall morning spent among the trees in the forest of poetry, I too stumble into the street, out to take my daily walk. Everywhere, this strangeness of houses and people walking to their mailboxes or tending their gardens. Everywhere this assumption that life is all here, out in the open.
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