“Alcove”1
John Ashbery (1927–2017)
Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump
of the final hour,” lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.
And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who’s to say we weren’t provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.
“To the Unseeable Animal”2
Wendell Berry (b. 1934)
My daughter: “I hope there’s an animal somewhere that nobody
has ever seen. And I hope nobody ever sees it.”
Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods’ shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have waked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.
“Genealogy”3
Jennifer Chang (b. 1976)
This stream took a shorter course—
a thread of water that makes oasis
out of mud, in pooling,
does not aspire to lake. To river, leave
the forest, the clamorous wild.
I cannot. Wherever I am,
I am here, nonsensical, rhapsodic,
stock-still as the trees. Trickling
never floods, furrows its meager path
through the forest floor.
There will always be a root
too thirsty, moss that only swallows
and spreads. Primordial home, I am dying
from love of you. Were I tuber or quillwort,
the last layer of leaves that starts the dirt
or the meekest pond,
I would absorb everything.
I would drown. Water makes song
of erratic forms, and I hear the living
push back branches, wander off trail.
“The Bat is dun, with wrinkled Wings”4
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
The Bat is dun, with wrinkled Wings—
Like fallow Article—
And not a song pervade his Lips—
Or none perceptible.
His small Umbrella quaintly halved
Describing in the Air
An Arc alike inscrutable
Elate Philosopher.
Deputed from what Firmament—
Of what Astute Abode—
Empowered with what malignity
Auspiciously withheld—
To his adroit Creator
Ascribe no less the praise—
Beneficent, believe me,
His eccentricities—
“What mystery pervades a well!”5
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far—
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar
Whose limit none have ever seen,
But just his lid of glass—
Like looking every time you please
In an abyss’s face!
The grass does not appear afraid,
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
To what is awe to me.
Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands next the sea—
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.
“House Sparrow at Skara Brae”6
Elizabeth Dodd (b. 1962)
On Orkney mainland
Feathers the color of winter-dried
heather, or sandstone, or kelp.
Little mouthful of grasses,
lichen-barred wings.
Loch vowel-shifts to lake; lapwings
glean and feed in the ancient fields.
Now each room lies open,
stone bedsteads, the fireless hearth.
Burnt whalebone, sheep dung, atoms
of ashes, the jet stream carbon follows:
spent breath, then flesh. (Wind
washes the beach sand, ever dissolving
low sky into spray.) Today,
soot blown from Asia seeds rain
over Iceland. Consonants dropped
in the sand cast fractal shadows,
shattered clusters of gesture. The bird flits
through the still-roofed passage, passes
from sight. Sediment catches in crevices,
waves sough on the distant cliffs.
Wasn’t there something—
I think I wanted to tell you something.
All morning clouds open and close windows
in the sky, the stone slabs sliding back into place.
“Out of the Field”7
Lisa Fishman (b. 1966)
In the weather that was not written
in documents attesting to order,
the windrows of straw defined the field
a series of parallel lines
cut down to dry and raked
in rows to bale.
In the hour that was not given
on the dial, the ladder
stood in snow
leaning against nothing, climbing where.
The moon lit the wooden ladder
just resting in the blue white snow.
In the night of the morning to follow
the season had altered again, not to summer or winter
turning to fall
backward like a father off a ladder
past a daughter’s window
or a white dog loping past the potatoes
on the south slope, out of the field
of vision
“Human Memory is Organic”8
Peter Gizzi (b. 1959)
We know time is a wave.
You can see it in gneiss, migmatic
or otherwise, everything crumbles.
Don’t despair.
That’s the message frozen in old stone.
I am just a visitor to this world
an interloper really headed deep into glass.
I, moving across a vast expanse of water
though it is not water maybe salt
or consciousness itself
enacted as empathy. Enacted as seeing.
To see with a purpose has its bloom
and falls to seed and returns
to be a story like any other.
To be a story open and vulnerable
a measure of time, a day, this day one might say
an angle of light for instance.
Let us examine green. Let us go together
to see it all unstable and becoming
violent and testing gravity
so natural in its hunger.
The organic existence of gravity.
The organic nature of history.
The natural history of tears.
“Digging”9
Donald Hall (1928–2018)
One midnight, after a day when lilies
lift themselves out of the ground while you watch them,
and you come into the house at dark
your fingers grubby with digging, your eyes
vague with the pleasure of digging,
let a wind raised from the South
climb through your bedroom window, lift you in its arms
—you have become as small as a seed—
and carry you out of the house, over the black garden,
spinning and fluttering,
and drop you in cracked ground.
The dirt will be cool, rough to your clasped skin
like a man you have never known.
You will die into the ground
in a dead sleep, surrendered to water.
You will wake suffering
a widening pain in your side, a breach
gapped in your tight ribs
where a green shoot struggles to lift itself upwards
through the tomb of your dead flesh
to the sun, to the air of your garden
where you will blossom
in the shape of your own self, thoughtless
with flowers, speaking
to bees, in the language of green and yellow, white and red.
“Optimism”10
Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953)
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.
“The Tree”11
Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bough
And that god-feasting couple old
That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
‘Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart’s home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.
Credits
1 John Ashbery, “Alcove” from Planisphere: New Poems (Ecco, 2009). Copyright © 2009 by John Ashbery.
2 Wendell Berry, “To the Unseeable Animal” from Collected Poems 1957–1982 (Counterpoint, 1970). Copyright © 1984 by Wendell Berry.
3 Jennifer Chang, “Genealogy” from The History of Anonymity (The University of Georgia Press, 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer Chang.
4 Emily Dickinson, “The Bat is dun, with wrinkled Wings” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
5 Emily Dickinson, “What mystery pervades a well!” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
6 Elizabeth Dodd, “House Sparrow at Skara Brae” is copyright © Elizabeth Dodd.
7 Lisa Fishman, “Out of the Field” from Dear, Read: Poems (Ahsahta Press, 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Lisa Fishman.
8 Peter Gizzi, “Human Memory is Organic” from The OuterNationale (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Peter Gizzi.
9 Donald Hall, “Digging” from Old and New Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1990). Copyright © 1990 Donald Hall.
10 Jane Hirshfield, “Optimism” from Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins Publishers, 2001). Copyright © 2001 Jane Hirshfield.
11 Ezra Pound, “The Tree” from Personae (New Directions, 1990). Copyright © 1926 Ezra Pound.
“Poetry in the Gardens” is a temporary art installation. Each of the poems included in the installation is copyright © by its respective copyright holder(s) and is reproduced in the Field & Fork Farm and on this website for exclusively non-commercial, transformative, and educational purposes.