I’ve never been a fan of nature. On weekends, I don’t think to myself “you know what would be fun? Blisters and mosquito bites.” Yes, fresh air is good and there are birds and stuff, but mostly I prefer to wander imaginary places, talking to imaginary people, that are really just extensions of myself—all very normal behavior.
Maybe it’s a matter of age (I’m 51) or of no longer drinking, or maybe I should blame all the Mary Oliver poems I’ve been reading, but in the last few months I’ve started to enjoy the out of doors. Actually it’s worse than that, I’m starting to need the out of doors. How are all trees, even the ugly ones, so perfect? I don’t know. How are birds so cool? How do I feel so much better after an hour of wandering than I do after an hour of Twitter? That one I can answer.
So when you’re done judging me, if you feel like reading a poem, here are two new ones about this unsettling development.
City Girl
It’s not that I’ve forgotten the romance of big city streets, vibrating with collective energy, and hubris and untested hope, or vibrating with workaday buses— twenty years ago I came to the city, desperate for bigger dimensions, for improbable twists and bright flavors. I wanted to see windows with stone aprons, broke-down pubs, and great glass boxes, to find myself in the presence of poets, schemers, wizards, rocket scientists and other absurdities. I wanted movement, uprising, anthems of progress, fistfuls of sky— nor have I forgotten that city is a table where the world gathers round (kimchi baklawa tamales akara), twelve countries on every block, with twelve children in every color, ignoring the lesson of Babel, inventing a common tongue, but romance doesn’t pay my rent and the city has become harder to love. The cracks are bigger, the portions meaner, the boots come marching round whenever anthems are sung, and the reality is, or the reality has become that chosen sons can climb quite high, but the rest of Babel lives and dies in the ever-growing shadow of the glass boxes.
Country Girl
Yesterday, I left the city, worried as always and gray with exhaust —not for good, just a weekend of quiet and solace and meander. I’m always surprised by the bigger dimensions of a smaller place, the unbroken sky, some furrowed hills, an uprising of trees. I saw parking lot stairs where a rosemary bush had been squatting for years, fat, pompous, four dollars a spine in most city stores. I followed a running path where the asphalt gave out on the edge of a shimmering wood, and saw geese with mullets in a serious argument, who, even if they’d seen me, wouldn’t have whistled. I ran by headless daffodils on a cemetery road, and saw a hasty ramp at the crest of a hill, green and slick and way too high— bicycle tracks still fresh, the afternoon still ringing with the scream of a boy who traded his spleen for a chance to fly. I’m starting to believe it’s possible to feel at home in a green place, with probable twists and familiar faces, one that grows over fences and sounds like bees and has all the time in the world, and no one is more surprised than me.
I followed that same path. Wanted the big city life, but found home and myself in the country. I wish you could team up with R.E.M. and create a beautiful song. Your poems sound like lyrics to me. Love them.