To Live with a Landscape

1 Take your boulevards, your Locust Street, Your Chestnut, Pine, your Olive, Take your Forest Park and Shaw’s Garden, Your avenues that lead past street-corner violence, Past your West End, past your Limit, To shabby suburban crime, Vandalism in the parking-lot, Abductions from the shopping mall— Like making the same mistake over and over On the piano or typewriter keys, Always hitting the wrong note— How “very alive, very American” They are, how chockful of metaphysics, Hellbent to obliterate the wilderness. 2 Learn to live with sycamores, Their sad, peeling trunks, scabbed all over With shabby patches, their enormous leaves In dingy shades of ochre and dun Rattling like castanets, their roots Thick as a man’s leg, crawling Like enormous worms out of the broken pavements, Continually thrusting themselves up From pools of shade they make, Sculpturing the street With dappled dark and light As glaucoma, a disease of the eye, Makes the world more beautiful With its mysterious rainbows. 3 Already in Iowa the monarchs are emerging, Signaling with their tawny wings; In regalia of burnt orange and umber The spangled imperial procession Meanders along the democratic roadsides, Across straight state lines, Over rivers and artificial lakes And the loneliness of middle America On the way to Mexico. The tiny wind of their passing Is not even recorded As a disturbance in the atmosphere. 4 Driving back into the American past, Homesick for forests, flowers without names, vast savannahs, Lowlands or mountains teeming with game, Bluffs crowned with cottonwoods, mudbanks Where crocodiles might sun themselves; Finding instead the remains of strange picnics, Replications of old selves, a cacophony of changes Like a room crowded with chairs In which no one can sit, as if history were furniture Grown splintered and shabby; Studying a picturesque rustic architecture To master its splendid abstractions, Shady verandas and porches, Or the republican simplicity of a cow.