The Light in Bedford
How much is lost in cities,
Reflected off of streets by sun
And knocked around the trees
By the massive traffic jam
Of breeze and heat and slum,
What noises bounced off faces
Hardened into walls by dirt,
And work, and worthless places
Fought for like so many works
Of art, that grass and space
And the croak of frogs would shame,
Would blot up into lawn
And time and types of green
That cities turn to slime,
The orange shade of ponds
In Rahway and in Tenafly,
Grades that nature never gave
To its uncluttered class of dyes,
Turned by numbers into slaves
Of what is merely pavement,
Concrete surfaces that in
The country fill the eye,
Sink into the ground
And resonate like sky
On sea, so that the skin
Is braced and patched, even
Tanned by the little burrs
Of light that pump adrenalin
Into simple spots of summer
And make pictures from the human,
Urban catalogues of earth.
Explanation
The poem is simple enough. It attacks city in favor of country. But does it? And what was I really thinking about when I wrote it? What skeletons do I have hidden even from myself? How does the last line change the poem entirely? I have some explaining to do. Henry Ford did not say, "Never complain, never explain," when arrested for drunk driving. His PR man dug the line up from Disraeli the next day. What Henry Ford said was: "A nice looking place. I'd like to buy it."
Without concrete, we might take grass for granted. Do we need the concrete to enjoy the abstract? Are fields real, and cities false? Which is ideal, which is imposition? This is no trivial dichotomy. Since the industrial revolution, we have lived divided lives. Caught in the shift between a farm and a machine society, we have to choose. Town and country both fight for primacy in our lives. If one is good and the other worse, how does this apply to human nature? Are we essentially happy farmers, or corrupt urbanites? Has society ruined us, or do we ruin society? Which comes first? Good or bad? Which is the overlay, which is the base?
If streets are bad and fields are good, does one cause the other? Do mean streets make meadows pleasant? Does good country create the need for bad town, or does a bad town require a margin, a little landscaping? Is good a command performance? Does evil manufacture good for contrast? Does the devil create god, as Kant might say? Are zebra stripes black or white? Slides need borders to silhouette their own transparency; noisy boarders in a quiet house. Which is intrinsic?
In this poem, good and evil mix. The incidental, the reflected light where I live in the country is almost urban; it brings incident, event to the landscape, as crowds create excitement in otherwise depressing city neighborhoods. Light brings feeling out of us the way sun brings a tan out of the skin, the way photo albums bring memories out of poses, the way city and country bring out the best as well as the worst in each other.
The final word is hidden in the final line. Slums are catalogues of the same earth as fields are, so that despite the ugliness of a city, we love it like country sometimes. It is part of our life. This sentiment is the opposite of the major thrust of the poem, and is an illustration of how we all can believe two opposing theories at once, merging them in our minds or our poems to create a final acceptance of existence itself in all its contradictions. Hegel called this systematic pluralism. Left and right can function simultaneously as parts of a third direction. One diplomat can help two ideologues coexist. The zebra is both black and white.