This project of "daily" postings has slowed into every-other-dailies. My time has been consumed by work-work: a slog of an edit, and the necks proofread I've referred to a few times here. But the necks job is now done—I'll send it off tomorrow—which leaves just the slog. (There will be no pithy lessons or fascinating tidbits gleaned from that one, I guarantee.) And so, I'm resolving to gift myself with something stimulating or rewarding every day, to tide me over.
Today, for example, I started reading Finger Exercises for Poets, a new book by Dorianne Laux (whom I have featured here at least once). She quotes Robert Hass for an epigraph: "You can do your life's work in half an hour a day." Which I do try to do once a week, anyway, in my regular prompt-oriented writing group.
Anyway, her first chapter is called "Look at a Thing," and after she presents the perhaps most famous imagist poem ever, William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," she zooms out to two poems about rock and stone.
The first, by Robinson Jeffers, is about the country just south of me, where I have worked as a volunteer wilderness ranger for ten or more years now. The places in this poem are in my blood—and it's a rare thing to have that sort of deep knowledge, understanding, love, for a place that someone else also knows, understands, loves, in their own way, and then describes in a poem. But the heart of the poem is something all of us understand, in our own place, our own time.
Oh, Lovely Rock
We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucias, first that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On tthe ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son's face and his companion's, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire's breath, tree-trunks were seen, it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock . . . as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange . . . I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.
Next, Charles Simic's poem about something you might keep in your pocket and touch, for reassurance, or the simple pleasure of rubbing it, or to be reminded of the mystery of it all.
Stone
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
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