Tom M. Wilson

The recently deceased American poet Stanley J. Kunitz once wrote a poem called ‘Layers’. I want to quote some lines from this poem, as they seem to me to perfectly capture the experience of loss that is part of being human. Despite the heart’s ‘feast of losses’, we mostly manage to continue onwards down the road. With poetry like this to bring into speech the reality of loss, somehow such experiences seem more tractable.  With his language Kunitz makes it easier for us to continue on down the road.  Here are a few lines from ‘Layers’:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.

The year was 1969… the back to the land movement was underway. People were heading off to build little wooden cabins in forest clearings and Gary Snyder published his poem Smokey the Bear Sutra:

SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of forces that guard the Wilderness, which is the natural state of the Dharma and the True Path of man on earth; all true paths lead through mountains-

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs;

smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned food, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country.

Can you imagine such a politically spirited, slightly naive but powerful eco-manifesto having followers today? Where is Smokey the Bear in 2008?

I don’t know.

[These are a few lines I wrote a little while back about the divide between culture and nature.]

NATURE AND THE BREAKFAST TABLE IN AN AUSTRALIAN GARDEN

I’m let free from my mooring in the night.
Stretch into the morning without a fight.
Step down the hall.

But then, sick to my stomach of flat, human crafted surfaces,
Tired of synthetic tables and silent curses.
I walk out into my garden.
No, I go out the back door, into a green then.

In my right hand I carry an old handsaw,
Used by my grandfather and disused a lot more.
I walk towards an offending trunk and leaves,
Non-native, invasive, bringer of luxuriant thieves.

Place the teeth to the bark,
Place my right foot to the ground among the twigs.
Then I move and find I’m dynamic among the verdure,
Far from that breakfast table.

A cat watches me from the distant grass,
His eyes glisten and
My spirit glistens.