Poetics of Loss 6

Thrush Music: American Poet-Naturalists and the Poetics of Loss | p 6

What a fitting and, I believe, deliberate emblem of the American poet-naturalist: belated walker, poised at the edge of words, where wildness begins. That final acknowledgment of nature's indifference quickens rather than dispels our desire to hear a human meaning in the thrush music. The real invitation to come in resides in that phrase "almost like"—Frost inviting us to participate in the delicate, playful work of making believe, of affirming meaning by recognizing its limits. "All metaphor breaks down somewhere," Frost says. "That is the beauty of it.... It is as life itself." This is where poetics and ethics meet: in the recognition that the meanings we make are expressed through, not in spite of, their impermanence. Farmwork, teaching, care for loved ones and for the planet are, like the poem, a momentary stay against confusion, and it is our joy to do them.

Thrush song, stream song, holy love

That flows through earthly forms and folds,

The song of Heaven's Sabbath fleshed

In throat and ear, in stream and stone,

A grace living here as we live,

Move my mind now to that which holds

Things as they change.

This is the beginning of one of Wendell Berry's untitled psalms in his collection, Sabbaths. The poem's speaker walks quietly out through the spring fields that are under his care,

But I go on, beyond, higher

In the hill's fold, forget the time

I come from and go to, recall

This grove left out of all account,

A place enclosed in song.

A fashionable reading might suggest that that place is the poem itself and that the poem embodies the linguistic moment of its own creation in the mind of the poet, for there is no real correspondence between words and things, and our relation to the world is always mediated by a song. This way of reading is meant to reassure a consumer culture, one that no longer knows where the food and water come from or how the clothes are made. A better way to begin healing the wound of our lost contact with the earth might be to re-read our poet-naturalists, even Emerson, as if they meant what they said, as if their essays and poems contained practical wisdom about our place and our conduct in nature. "The subject of poetry," Berry says, "is not words, it is the world." Those of us who would bring an ecological intelligence to our teaching and writing might, in addition to placing environmental issues in the foreground of our work, insist in playful earnest that the place enclosed in song is an uncleared acre on Berry's farm, the empty lot down the street, the last undeveloped sub-division in the county, and the song that brings us to that place is real: "Thrush music—hark!"