Still, I think I’m missing the mountains.
No other fad can top the arrangement matter got itself into in the Permian.
Not even war.
In them, I can get lost,
for their disruptive lumps, layers, dizzying topographies, razorback ridges,
and for their slowly cooled destruction.
They put me in my right mind,
where shadowed, I feel of proper size, wit, and thrust, which is to say
small.
In them I have no “gaze.”
My eyes don’t seek out and lift toward High Point. I don’t sprint for the overlook,
which is aptly named.
Rather, my molten awareness spreads out
broadly over this world, but of course unevenly with lumps and layers,
disproportions of its own.
From the dimpled crestline above Nantahala,
I could at once feel a sense of Appalachia, and a nonsense as I recalled
Fondwa and Cuernavaca.
Brecht said there are times
when one can consider it a crime to write of trees. When the house next door
is burning.
He meant that, amidst urgent necessity,
one ought not fiddle with precision. That would be treason
to thy neighbor.
But we speak as bad fiddlers,
so when we sound the alarm, it often doesn’t help either, because
we’ve obscured the real issues.
Political writers may always speak of trees,
if to see atrocities in context, to fiddle less, better, to figure why we are so bent
on wrecking both people and place.
Go to the mountains if they’re your mind’s own space,
where you see what’s before you but also what’s absent, where your awareness lingers widely but disproportionately on what matters. Or go to Mexico.
Go wherever, just don’t fiddle yourself out of context.
You’ll have found your place when you hear this poem:
The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.
When at the end,
You don’t have to ask yourself:
I wonder why he said that?
When the rural is no longer romantic,
but no longer debased either. When it is recognized as having a place
within the vocation of the world, we’ll have found it.
I may have found mine.
We are probably both surprised to hear me say
it’s not the mountains.
That would be too easy. It’s the piedmont, that great tease,
where I can almost see the Blue Ridge, but not quite, even though
I’m standing on it.
It reminds me of the hypocrisy
of yearning for what I’ve already got and of stubbornly insisting
on seeing with my eyes.
This hill pasture, with an occasional retreat deeper, will do,
will keep me in my place, slow and preoccupied
with the work of preserving life.
-MKS
Raw Skimmed Milk 