Pruner
I do sometimes what the autumn wind does:
Like a saw without a buzz,
I clear the deadwood off a waving tree
Like the breeze does, silently.
I am the reaper of the blight,
Maiming as I let in night,
Chopping up the understory as I try
To cut a modest path to sky,
Starting with the lowest spray
And snipping upwards to the day,
The way a poet uses diction
To lend some sunlight to his fiction,
The way a poet uses rhyme
To turn a couplet to a crime,
Using up his gardener’s tricks
To make a landscape out of sticks
Or in fact to make the air
By the sticks’ not being there,
Making scenery from clips,
Calypso from apocalypse,
Removing dancers one by one
To bring the ballroom back to sun,
While the dancers do the opposite,
Chasing scripts so badly lit
That who knows just what Frankenstein
Their random snapping might design,
Hacking off the weaker limbs
To liberate the wooden whims
Of aspen, spruce, and pine,
Digging out the forest’s mine
To see what gold the world allows
When woods stand up without their boughs,
Watching how some branches might
Turn the wrong way from the light,
Spending years producing bark
That leaves them finally in the dark,
Like me, who spends a lifetime getting back
To the leafy clarity I lack.
October 10th & 12th, 1993
Explanation
This is an insidious poem, using as it does indirections to find directions out. As I was cutting away dead branches from the trees on the dirt road to the house in Edwards, I kept noticing all the wrong turns a branch had to make to get itself overshadowed. This reminded me, morbidly, no doubt, of poetry, of all the wrong turns you make, like a columbine inching its way perhaps towards sun, perhaps towards death, it never really knows. So here is all the deadwood that a poem must cut away to reveal the actual trunk, the waves and caves of Calypso’s island. The dancing leaves in fact get in the way, of the clarity, of the lucid Dodecanese light, as meaning itself is only a diversion away from reaching for warmth, for sun.
Structure, meter, rhyme are the shears I use to deepen the warmth, the music, the way I have to start at the bottom of a tree to prune it, because if you prune the top branches first, you end up cutting a few distant live ends, as they are hard to trace. So you start at the bottom and trace your poem towards the light. And you trace it through the suffering that produces it, the blight of discarded family affections, of a world twisting in the wrong direction, of lives crumbling around you, as you look for the strength to keep believing in luxurious essences beneath the deadwood. Structure, mess, underneath the deadwood. Here structure steps in. As James Merrill says, form’s what affirms. It is exactly that resonance of rhyme, Calypso’s classicism, which extrudes faith out of apocalypse, dances out of death, lips from crypts.
In fragmenting light, the way Tzara cut up words to form poems, the way a pruner chops up the sense of trees to promote forests, I try to indicate to myself all the sticks that must be removed to make a tree, and, in stressing the negative space that makes for modest growth, I do not claim to be that creative ranger, but only the woodsman who clears the way for others, who tries, despite himself, to make sense, while in fact all he wants to do really is find the delirium in Armageddon, to convey some residue of the delight of dark November skies before a snowfall.
The latitude the world allows us to walk naked, to prune our dance of distractions, and, for an afternoon, speak dead languages and think like trees, is probably a thin longitudinal line, without dimension, but so is sunlight.
Cathy points out that, without Auden’s and MacLeish’s and Odysseus’ Calypso, without Wilbur’s opposites, without Frost’s governing design, without Seuss’ Lorax, Marvell’s mower, and Keats’ autumn, I would just be an old gardener, being chased through the woods by poets with pruning shears.