On the land with Kunitz and Oliver

Planting trees is a terrorist activity.

“Terrorist” in the sense of doing something that might threaten the chosen life style of someone living a fearful unchallenged life on a tiny mortgaged suburban block of nondescript banality.

Therefore, up on the hillside this past week at the top boundary of Windgrove, Steve and I fenced off a circle and then planted out a volatile mixture of 108 Tasmanian native trees.

“Let’s disrupt the status quo”, I say. I mean, who else would spend $60,000 over the past 20 years putting trees into the ground that I’ll never see mature nor get any financial return from? Crazy in the eyes of the capitalist world? You bet.

Real gold, though, is earned in working the soil. Whether flowers or trees, it matters not.

In a recent email, I was reminded of the poem Mary Oliver wrote about the gardener poet Stanley Kunitz. This poem I’ll post below.

Following Oliver’s poem is a Kunitz poem that is also a favorite of mine. Find a quiet moment to read them slowly. Perhaps, two or three times. Savor the depth and crafted excellence each poet came to in their individual lives by patiently immersing themselves in the gardened land they each, over many years, trod gently on and stuck fingers into.

Stanley Kunitz

I used to imagine him
coming from his house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder –
it has happened every summer for years.

But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house –
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
know that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience –
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.

Oh, what good it does the heart
to know it isn’t magic!
Like the human child I am
I rush to imitate –
I watch him as he bends
among the leaves and vines
to hook some weed or other;
I think of him there
raking and trimming, stirring up
those sheets of fire
between the smothering weights of earth,
the wild and shapeless air.

Mary Oliver

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Stanley Kunitz