I
Storms moved across the Rockies
and through the plains, rode the jet stream
east. By the time they reached us: rain.
And there were other things that looked —
to other eyes — like welcome news.
The country tilting right.
A few more punishments for the poor.
It was the winter winter never came
to South Jersey; no natural equivalent,
once again, to our lives. All around us
a harshness, a severity, not destined soon
to stop. Oh, we were part of it,
reserved ourselves for just a few,
held back instead of gave. Our hearts:
caged things, no longer beating
for the many, who were too many now.
Meanwhile, the Dakotas were snowed in.
A bad wind came off the lakes,
and Chicago and Buffalo braced
for a familiar misery, predictable,
the satisfaction, at least, of what was due.
Here the sun came out and stayed for days.
It wasn’t cold enough to think of warmth.
For months, it seemed, we lived lower
in the nation, seasonless, the answers
mostly Christian, though far from Christlike,
to every hard and bitter question.
II
The impatient, upstart crocuses
and daffodils fell once again
for the lies of March.
They simply wanted to exist.
The warm sun must have said Now,
and they gave themselves
to that first, hardly refusable touch.
History was whispering
at least another frost,
but who listens to the hushed sobrieties
of the old? The daffodils died
the advantaged death
of those with other deaths to live.
We stripped down, got colds.
Heraclitis, I want to say I’ve stepped
into the same stream twice,
and everything felt the same.
It wasn’t, I know that now,
but what it felt like
had a truth of its own.
The daffodils and crocuses
traveled through the solitude
of what they felt
toward what they might become.
Choiceless, reactive, inhuman-
nothing to admire in what they did.
III
A superior sky mottled in the west,
the water beneath it glassy, still.
As I crossed the bridge, there it was:
the landscape’s invitation to forget.
An osprey swooped low, disreputable
as birds go, but precise, efficient,
a banker in wing-tips, office-bound,
ready to foreclose.
We live in a postcard, I thought,
cropped, agreeably, to deceive;
beyond its edges
broken glass at the schoolyard,
routine boredom, decency, spite.
And then the white, wood-framed
colonials on either side of 575,
Sinton’s apple orchard, the shack
with three old cars in front of it,
its porch slanted, no one ever home.
The mowed field and the field wild
with rockrose and goat’s rue
declared themselves as property, ours,
no one else’s, and I acknowledged
how good the differentiating spaces were
between people and people,
I, who, years ago –
acolyte to an era’s pious clarities –
went home to accuse
my dear parents of being capitalists.
IV
Clear nights I looked upward and said,
“My God,” a figure of speech,
another exhalation of surprise.
The sky was enormous, a planetarium
without walls, the stars free of charge.
Its mythy inhabitants were loose in us,
free-floating energies, nameless now.
It was April, unusually dry.
Forest fires moved through the Barrens.
We needed rain and got wind.
Once we’d have prayed, and gotten wind.
The fires reached Batsto, were stopped
in time, though our time would come.
How to live as if it would? Deeper? Wilder?
Yard sale on Clarks Landing Road.
Raffle at the church. My own yard needing
the care a good citizen would give it.
Thousands of quiet ways to gradually die.
I drove eight miles to the fire’s edge.
Planes dropping water had stopped it
and a turn in the wind
and men with shovels and courage.
They didn’t need to dig deep, but wide.
It was beyond them, what they had done.
V
Pascal, even your century compelled you
to feel, “We wander in times not ours.”
There were authorities in those days,
there were soul-maps; it’s heartening
you knew they couldn’t be yours.
Here a four-wheel drive can make it through
our wilderness. The hunter-worn paths
instruct us where to turn. It seems
that much harder to get good and lost.
I dream of the rumored secret road
in Warren Grove, at the end of which
a canoe waits, and miles of winding river.
Dream, too, of the rumored Satanists there
and cats and dogs disemboweled.
I think, Pascal, you would feel
little has changed.
Cherry and apple blossoms can’t distract us
long enough, or streets charged
with beautiful body, beautiful face.
Still, I can’t be sure, as you were,
that what’s hidden is any more mysterious
than the palpable immensity that isn’t.
VI
The winter winter never came-like memory
itself-moved from fact to language,
a coloration of what was seen and felt.
My ear still liked winter’s doubling.
My eye was fond of its nearness to mistake.
Yet the made world had turned
to the stirrings of grass and insect,
to Oklahoma City bereft.
How little moral effort it takes to open,
then close our hearts! I found myself inclined
now to incident, now to words, conflicted,
like someone besot with spices and sauce,
wishing to stay thin.
The weather urged us out, away from worry,
that indoor work. Cut-offs and rollerblades
met us daringly at the curb, American
as pick-up trucks with rifle racks.
If we walked far enough and looked:
loosestrife, goldenrod, pixie-moss.
I knew loosestrife, I knew so many such things
before I knew their names.
VII
Mornings I used to walk the dogs
by Nacote Creek, months before their deaths,
I’d see the night’s debris, the tide’s vagaries,
the furtive markings of creatures desperate
to eradicate every smell not theirs.
I understood those dogs, who had so little
of their own. Why not perfume
a rock, make a bush a thing redolent
of their best selves? The boat launch
slanted waterward. The dogs avoided it,
bred for land, doomed to sniff
and cover-up and die-brothers, mine.
This was the town beach, where soon
children would vie with sandpiper and gull.
Every month, like every mind,
changed the way things looked.
I miss those mornings of the dogs.
Winter will be less wind-swept and personal
from now on, spring less observed.
VIII
Owned by the mayor’s brother,
out of earshot of the Zoning Board’s
center-of-town houses: The Shooting Place.
Farm-raised quail let loose like mice
for lazy cats, then the shotguns’ heavy-metal.
Elsewhere, of course, the quail were kids
who’d gotten in the way of gangs
or their parents’ close-quartered rage.
We protested anyway.
In Atlantic City, ten miles southeast,
the marshland gave way to slums
and bright lights. All nature there was human.
The six o’clock news showed the results.
Back here: pitchpine, crowberry, black oak.
Even the directions to The Shooting Place
made us want to say them. Down Chestnut Neck
to Red Wing Lake. Right at the campground.
Gone too far if you reach Beaver Run.
IX
A philosopher, musing cosmically, might think
we were people who needed to be disturbed,
would say no truth ever reveals itself
to those sipping something on their porch.
I hated the cosmic as I hated a big sound
on a quiet afternoon. And I was disturbed enough,
or thought I was, for a hundred truths
to come show their wounded, open hearts.
Where were they then?
Our margaritas were rimmed with salt.
It was s p.m. Time even for philosophers –
sure of shelter and sufficient bread-
to take off their shoes, settle in.
Far away, men were pulling bodies from debris,
a moan the sweetest, most hopeful thing.
X
It’s been their time—this winter’s spring-
the shooters and the complainers
on a side not mine. They wanted America
theirs again, they said, and shouted their votes.
Mice abandoned their ingenious, fluffy homes
in attics and storage rooms, returned
to the fields. Every owl in the county knew.
Everything that couldn’t think and everything
that could had made sensible plans.
At school, because it was his bold time,
a home-grown senior hot for elsewhere,
asked why I stayed in South Jersey.
“Because it hasn’t been imagined yet,” I said.
Where he saw nothing, I saw chance.
But I should have said in flat country
friends are mountains, that a place sometimes
is beautiful because of who was good to you
in the acrimonious air. So hard not to lie.
I should have said this landscape,
lush and empty and so undreamed,
is the party to which we bring our own.
I should have kept talking until I’d gotten it true.
Something about what the mouse doesn’t know
and the owl does. Something intolerable
like that, with which we live.
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