American Pastoral

Painting by David Tracy


American Pastoral


"O, weeping sons: These stanzas were once
yours until high into the heaving sins
of your fathers they were cast like
blind artifacts littering with tears
lost battlefields.." - Paolo Honorificas

1.
Washing the apples,
drying them,
placing them
one by one
in a brown clay bowl,
glittering
with their green,
I was making ready
on a day
birds sing about.
I opened
all the windows.
Left no door closed,
for I was
making ready
as this song
in me began to burst
from the inside out.

2.
On this Pacific Coast
had we no voice
the trees would speak for us.
The red barked sequoia,
the stoic spruce,
quirky villages of unkempt,
mossy sided alder.
Cedars towering
over salmon streams.
The homely dogwood,
dull and drab one day,
miraculously alive,
blossoming with color the next.
Look at the trees.
Just look at the trees.
Broad shouldered,
unashamed, upright,
all out there
in a direct and simple way.
Here, we learn early
to name the trees.
They are our measure
of all things great.

3.
When I run, I don't always know
what I'm running toward
or away from. In me the sweat
of ancient blood and salt;
violence of sinew rubbing
against sinew, muscle, bone.
Therefore, know
my loves are wild and tart
as berries on the juniper tree
nurtured in the bedrock
crevices of who I am
and everywhere I look,
your all consuming horizon,
airy as a meadow
viewed from my mind's peak
transgresses the lyric
in its rugged capacity to sustain.
When fragile as a wounded wing
I hurt, or become self-righteously
smug like a worn proverb,
or consumed by doubts,
it is to your Pacific Coast
I come for your flesh in me
is a constant reminder of who I am.
I rejoice in your constant making
and remaking and when my love
for you explodes into a windy brawl
surging through public streets
with angry bitches,
condemnations, complaints,
it's merely your unbridled
enthusiasms having found their place
in me for in my own prayers
I would have us both better than we are
or have any right to be.

4.
Out of your ancient flesh
whole forests
and civilizations have grown,
burned, been cut down
and brawling cities born
to rise in their place
layer upon layer
like an old man's face
we trace the furrowed paths
we walk along
but the past is never
fully replaced.
Indian grave yards
are still watered by Seattle mist.
Chinese opium dens
beneath the streets
of San Francisco.
Portions of an old water filled
mill race in the heart of Eugene.
Abandoned wagon ruts
and wood plank roads,
rusting machinery
buried in the black
gold oozing dunes
of Whiskey Run Beach.
Who knows where begins
or ends the influence of things?

5.
At Hardscrabble Creek
water passes over rocks
whispering of baptismal suffering,
of endless mysteries.
I am unremarkable it seems to say.
Essence of water and blood my destiny.
My hands get dirty.
I am bound by insatiable appetites,
by the unfathomable and dark graffiti
marking with scars my private sanctuaries
and yet, when I was born
the world began again knowing neither
of success or failure but asking
all the questions that really mattered
echoing inside of me: I am not alone.
From hip, bop, punk rock,
lyrical and concrete. Up from New York,
Black Mountain and San Francisco streets
come incantations caught
in the head lights of my own mind
calling for an end to hypocrisy.
Be real, they say. Be honest.
No voice stifled. No cruelty condoned.
No injustice unredeemed.

6.
A hill and another hill
and then the road
whose borders
are wreathed in weeds
but straight and clean
as an arrow in the center
sleek caravans
of eighteen wheelers
speed down
as if they were land locked
leviathans
or migrating animals
without fur
ferrying the world's goods.
For them distance
is merely an empty space
to be got through
and each small town
a name between them
and their destination
To know this country is to be
in movement with it,
always west, always further,
over a hill and another hill
and then the mountains
to be mastered and got over
and then the long migration back.

7.
Out of the mouth
of the new
the wave comes.
The wave gives birth
and is hungry.
The wave vanishes
and can't be found.
Out of the valley
of destruction
it surfaces,
burning with necessity,
thundering into a deluge
screaming
the old gods are dead.
Make way for the new!

8.
Here, in the landfills
we call history,
are the burnt residue
of all our mistakes;
frayed ropes, nooses,
melted barrels
of rusting guns,
radioactive waste,
hidden orders consigning
this man, that woman,
whole communities
to gulags
and concentration camps.
Look at the grass
where they walked,
each green blade
watered by someone's tears
who were forced to march
where no one
should be made to go.
Here, in these ashes
of the past
let our darker sides
find rest for the great tree
of being
cares only how high we soar.
Man, above the possum,
below the dove and when
the feather of justice
falls from its scale
plunging ten miles
into the earth and there isn't a heart
strong enough or brave enough
or caring enough
to lighten it's weight
or raise it up,
there will be nothing
left in us to save.

- Scott Malby

Posted over on Motherbird