Understory

Although it seems obvious to me now, in a few years I may be as baffled by it as anyone else, so let me jog memory with a few breathless footnotes.

Buckminster Fuller once told Hugh Kenner’s daughter that a flaming log was the sun uncoiling from a tree. Haiku-like, the phrase seemed to contain a countryside ramble with Kenner’s family, as well as everything that unwinds from a poem after a lifetime of trails and fields. A poem, or a poet, is a party bag of misspent events, exotic fruits, overgrown trellises, demasting seas, belaying disasters, and soigné paper bag collections, which I suppose explains nothing at all about the rhyme peering impatiently over the fence.

But of course it does. A poem, a poet is only the tip of the iceberg. It is the understory, the figured bass, the undertone in the next room, the offing over the horizon, hazy beach days and undulating heat waves distorting the view, everything suspected, half seen, partly connected. It is the random fish the painter draws after five years of practicing fish. It is what a terrified pianist plays in a concert after forty years of dissection, repetition, analysis.

The understory in a forest shelters saplings until they can fight on their own for sun against wind and rain. It finesses the clumsy seam between tree and dirt, it softens the proportions of sudden trees on flat land.

It is also the story that unfolds out of leaves the hints of past summers. It is preverbal thought which provokes words, color which foments momentary memories. Clues which create poems, passing emotions which make nations, tiny presumptions on which galaxies ride, trivial novelists who write Proust.

It is a warning to condescend to apparent frailty at our own risk. Great pines depend on small weeds. Giants ride on the back of children. Genius needs a shopping list. The rigid, organized, and disapproving don’t start Google, write Ulysses, or paint Guernica.