This morning I lazily opened up Dream Work, stumbled on the poem “Stanley Kunitz”, and a flood of memories came rushing in.
Years ago, on a very early morning–before dawn even, it seemed–my brother dropped me off on his way to the airport, and since he was short on time, he let me off where I’d make a short walk to my apartment in Lower Queen Anne by cutting through the Seattle Center and he can continue on out to the highway.
As I walked by an unassuming corner across from the Center House, I saw words etched into big pieces of polished stone, and that’s when I discovered the poem The Layers by Stanley Kunitz.
When I resumed my walk, these lines stayed on my mind,
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.I am not done with my changes.
Stanley is a pretty decent (read: crazy good) gardener, it turns out. In “Stanley Kunitz”, Mary Oliver wrote about discovering that “it isn’t magic”, and here she blasted her notion of him strolling about idly among the birds and the bees and the trees.
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
knowing that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience–
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.
Today, the image forming in my mind is a poet laboring away in his garden, “raking the trimming, stirring up those sheets of fire” patiently pulling weeds among the leaves and vines.
And speaking of gardening and my brother, this reminds me of a time when we saw Candide, laughing our asses off together and silently drove home together, me pondering on the last line of the play. Pangloss was philosophizing about sequences and possibilities of events in life, and Candide simply said, “We must all cultivate our own garden.”
Stanley Kunitz
by Mary Oliver
I used to imagine him
coming from the house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder–
it has happened every summer for years.
But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house–
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
knowing that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience–
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.
Oh, what good it does the heart
to know it isn’t magic!
Like the human child I am
I rush to imitate–
I watch him as he bends
among the leaves and vines
to hook some weed or other;
even when I do not see him,
I think of him there
raking the trimming, stirring up
those sheets of fire
between the smothering weights of earth,
the wild and shapeless air.
The Layers
By Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.