The question may be raised why we chose precisely the past of a city to compare with the past of a mind.–Civilization and Its Discontents
On My Love of Country Life
He ruminated, cigar in crippled jaw.
Cocaine pulsed like the strobe on that cop’s cruiser.
There’s oceanic distance from where Freud sat
To where I stand just now as I visit Manhattan,
Which back in the doctor’s day was no Big Apple.
The Sheep Meadow still held sheep. But in time they’d vanish,
This park be thronged, and we’d raise his question–
Or I would, comparing his moment to our own,
When even that rim of posies by the reservoir’s
South end at 87th seems a threat.
Imagination, mine at least, would crave
A village, clean, essential, if maybe not
The one I’ve lived in so long. Are you like me?
Can you conjure some antique European hamlet,
Complete with organ grinder, antic monkey,
Coins chink-chinking in a proffered cup,
Air as soft as bedclothes? Here in the city,
That bus’s diesel chokes me. Jackhammers rattle,
Even past dark. Pigeons move at will,
Cosmopolites, while the park affects a show
Of green among the cans and candy wrappers,
Rinds and condoms, jugs of Sneaky Pete
In shards. The traffic seems deployed for battle.
Its headlamps will sweep across the stoops come night,
Across the benches, where mad folk rage against
The day gone by, or politicians, sports teams.
Just so, at night, some of us heard our elders,
Late in our anxious puberty. They shrieked
Their calumnies downstairs. They slammed odd doors.
Are you like me? Did you long for simple precision,
Some scrap of explanation? Why do I keep
Including you? You may not be like me,
Who craved it so for all those years and years,
A way I could make some sense of the inward city,
Though I didn’t think in those terms, and even then,
My mind ached likewise for another place,
In which things blurred: a fleecy nap of meadow,
The spring blooms’ brightness muted, neighbors’ wagons
Full of hay gone evening-fragrant, glow
Of a vanishing sun on the picturesque houses’ stone,
And cattle and sheep intent upon their grazing–
They feed as if narcotized, their mild jaws rolling.
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind.
–William Wordsworth, “Surprised by Joy”
After First Snow, 2020
Lack of purpose was what I felt so then
I drove myself to the market one town south
to fetch some cranberry juice for a woman friend
who needed it for reasons known to women
and I intended that to be my gesture
at getting outside my Self so small so fetid
but I soon saw it didn’t work not really
on a Friday afternoon in the big store crowded
with busy shoppers readying for the weekend
and doing the same dull fruitless chores as I
had been doing all my nearly eighty goddamned
years which seemed incredible and not
and the radio in my car aired further proof
the president was a crook and his toadies liars
and though that whole vile crew of his denied it
our one and only earth was catching fire
and inwardly I said it’s one big shit-show
if you ask me which needless to say no one had
and I knew it too but that could scarcely slow
me down just then when my late-autumn ennui
invoked Ecclesiastes the thing that hath been
is that which shall be and that which is done
is that which shall be done and I agreed
that there is no new thing under the sun
and after my judgments at the grocery store
based on clothes and conduct I was blind
until making my way morose toward home once more
I looked out onto our famously beautiful-
as-a-picture-on-a-postcard river valley
and at the very moment I started to tell
myself again it was far too late for wonder
in the middle distance Black Mountain upthrust itself
its granite contours chiseled by boreal air
and white as any cloud might be right after
the prior night’s first snowfall of the year
all common yes but that the prospect had
for foreground a wide and lustrous swath of orange
which was Willie Fiedlston’s pumpkins left for seed
in the bottomland fields a hundred acres’ worth
and that color suddenly seemed to bathe the world
in a glow that hadn’t been seen before on earth
Outsider
A gigantic Kubota tractor drags
a rotary mower
at highway speed down the timothy field
along our river.
We’re driving toward unhurried, expensive Sunday
breakfast out with friends and family.
I brake for just a moment to sight
down the stubble swath
the tractor has left as it carves another.
I could stay and watch
for week upon week, and yet I’m sure I wouldn’t
know just what to feel. I envision
a group of sinewy men—all blood
relations, I’d say—
with long-hafted scythes. They’ll work until noon
to lay down the hay
that the big machine just sheared in a matter of seconds.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaThen
I picture a later farmer who reckons
how many more hours will disappear before he can finish
his task with the horse-drawn sickle bar.
The day will vanish
into black and he will have cropped just half his field.
How did those workers feel?
Did “feeling” matter? I blink and sigh
and go on my way,
too old by now, I hope, to imagine
Good old Days,
that witless myth, with its claim that exhausting labor
in those times made men and women better.
That strikes me as the very sort
of sweetened belief
contrived by people who haven’t ever
toiled in their lives–
farmed, or done much with back and hands at all.
And what about me? I do recall
bone-wrenching summer jobs I took
when I was a boy
on an uncle’s place: I planted fence posts,
I heaved baled hay,
and so on. Now I cut five cords of wood
to dry each spring inside our shed.
But it’s not that I have to work that way, nor did I
in those summers either.
I don’t know much, though I did know this place
when it was a diner.
Today quaint tools are hung on its walls as examples
of An older time when life was simple.
That’s what it says on a placard. a two-man
crosscut saw.
a harrow disk. Ice-tongs. An auger.
At least they know
how they feel, the sentimentalists. I order
Cider Crepes with Hand Churned Butter!
Sydney Lea’s latest collection, What Shines, is published by Four Way Books and available here.
Learn more about Sydney on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: Richard Walker/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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