Poetry Wednesday 2/18/09

The Seekonk Woods

BY GALWAY KINNELL

When first I walked here I hobbled

along ties set too close together

for a boy to step easily on each.

I thought my stride one day

would reach every other and from then on

I would walk in time with the way

toward that Lobachevskian haze

up ahead where the two rails meet.

Here we put down our pennies, dark,

on shined steel; they trembled, fell still;

then the locomotive out of Attleboro

rattling its berserk wheel-rods into perfect circles,

brightened them into wafers, the way a fork

mashes into view the inner light of a carrot

in a stew. In this late March sunshine,

crossing the trees at the angle of a bow

when it effleurages out of the chanterelle

the C three octaves above middle C,

the vertical birthwood remembers

its ascent lines, shrunken by half, exactly

back down, each tree on its fallen summer.

Back then, these rocks often asked

blood offerings—but this one, once, asked bone,

the time Billy Wallace tripped and broke out

his front teeth. Fitted with gold replicas,

he asked, speaking more brightly, “What good

are golden teeth, given what we’ve got

to eat?” Nebuchadnezzar

spent seven years down on all fours

eating vetch and alfalfa, ruminating

the mouth-feel of “bloom” and “wither,”

until he was whole. If you

held a grass blade between both thumbs

and blew hard you could blurt a shriek

out of it—like that beseeching leaves oaks

didn’t drop last winter just now scratch

on a breeze. Maybe Billy, lured

by bones’ memory, comes back

sometimes, too, to the Seekonk Woods,

to stand in the past and just look at it.

Here he might kneel, studying this clump of grass,

as a god might inspect the strands of a human sneeze

that percusses through. Or he might stray

into the now untrafficked whistling-lanes

of the mourning doves, who used to call and call

into the future, and give a start, as though,

this very minute, by awful coincidence,

they reach it. And at last traipse off

down the tracks, with arrhythmic gait,

as wanderers must do once they realize:

the over-the-unknown route, too, ends up

where time wants. On this spot

I skinned the muskrat. The musk breezed away.

I buried the rat. Of the fur

I made a hat, which as soon as put on

began to rot off, causing my scalp to crawl.

In circles, of course, keeping to the skull.

One day could this scrap of damp skin

crawl all the way off, and the whole organism

follow? To do what? Effuse with musk,

or rot with rat? When, a quarter-

turn after the sun, the half-moon,

too, goes down and we find ourselves

in the night's night, then somewhere

hereabouts in the dark must be death.

Knowledge of it beforehand is surely among

existence’s most spectacular feats—and yet right here,

on this ordinary afternoon, in these woods,

with a name meaning “black goose” in Wampanoag,

or in modern Seekonkese, “slob blowing fat nose,”

this unlikely event happens—a creature

walking the tracks knows it will come.

Then too long to touch every tie, his stride

is now just too short to reach every other,

and so he is to be still the wanderer, the hirtle

of too much replaced by the common limp

of too little. But he almost got there.

Almost stepped in consonance with the liturgical,

sleeping gods’ snores you can hear humming up

from former times inside the ties. He almost

set foot in that border zone where what follows

blows back, shimmering everything, making

walking like sleepwalking, railroad tracks

a country lane on a spring morning,

on which a man, limping but blissful,

makes his way homeward, his lips, suppled

by kissing to bunch up like that, blowing

these short strands of hollowed-out air,

haunted by future, into a tune on the tracks.

I think I’m about to be shocked awake.

As I was in childhood, when I battered myself

back to my senses against a closed door,

or woke up hanging out of an upstairs window.

Somnambulism was my attempt to slip

under cover of nightmare across no father’s land

and embrace a phantasm. If only

I had found a way to enter his hard time

served at labor by day, by night in solitary,

and put my arms around him in reality,

I might not now be remaking him

in memory still; anti-alchemizing bass kettle’s

golden reverberations back down

to hair, flesh, blood, bone, the base metals.

I want to crawl face down in the fields

and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes

stained pink, even for seven years

if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out

on my back under the thousand stars and think

my way up among them, through them,

and a little distance past them, and attain

a moment of absolute ignorance,

if I can, if human mentality lets us.

I have always intended to live forever;

but not until now, to live now. The moment

I have done one or the other, I here swear,

no one will have to drag me , I’ll come

but never will I agree to burn my words.

The poplar logs creosoted asleep under the tracks

have stopped snoring. Maybe they’ve

already waked up. The bow saws at G.

An oak leaf rattles on its tree. The rails

may never meet, O fellow Euclideans,

for you, for me. So what if we groan.

That’s our noise. Laughter is our stuttering

in a language we can’t speak yet. Behind,

the world made of wishes goes dark. Ahead,

if not now then never, shines what is

(click on the poet's name to read about him and hear him recite part of this poem and click on the title of the poem to see the book that contains this poem.)

Link back to the tour on Sans Souci's page