The place I spent my boyhood was landlocked; we were far
from the ocean, and from any other kind of major body of water, whether
significant lake or river. There were not even streams in that terrain: the
water table was deep and did not break through the deep and fertile layers of
soil laid down there millennia ago when our region was a shallow sea. Once
those waters departed, there was nothing to replace them except what fell from
the sky. The rich soil was not colonized by farmers until deep well technology
made it possible to drill through thick layers of limestone to tap the aquifer
there.
In the absence of natural standing water, our countryside
was dotted with artificial ponds; these had started as watering places for
livestock and fulfilled that function, but the landscape rapidly adopted them
as part of the ecology. Unlike in drier and less arable regions, our little
lakes did not sit uneasily or anomalously where they were constructed; they did
not look like constructs at all, but quickly settled in and became necessary
not only for cattle but also for a large array of flora and fauna that arrived
with amazing speed from sources that were not immediately apparent. They were
appropriated and integrated in such a way that one could hardly imagine the
area without them. From the air, one could see that they speckled the landscape
like scattered flecks of mica.
A quarter mile from our house, on the other side of a
gradual upward slope (at the top of which my father had built his barn), there
was one such pond. About five acres in extent, it was of medium size by the
standards of that place, and well located, with an enormous oak tree just
behind the dam providing both stability and, at the right time of day, shade.
That was clearly by design, as the oak was older than the pond. Other, smaller
trees—willows, mostly—had sprung up in the meanwhile, but not so many as to
make any area impassable or inaccessible. The water was deepest by the dam; on
the other side, there were extensive shallows where our cattle came to wade
out, cool themselves, and drink. This they did on a very regular schedule, in
the early morning and near sunset. They were often accompanied by their bird
familiars, cattle egrets, which during the summer followed the herd
continually, eating insects flushed out of the grass by the movements of the
cattle; sometimes they rode on cows’ backs, picking bugs off the coats of the
black angus my father favored and bred.
Other times of day the pond was less obviously populated,
though always populous nonetheless. During a certain period of my life—when I
was between nine and fifteen years old, more or less—I spent huge hunks of my
summers at the pond. One didn’t swim there: the water was clear enough, but the
pond produced huge crops of algae and other water plants, the bottom was the
very sticky mud our Black Prairie soil became when wet, and there were
certainly snakes, water moccasins in particular, to worry about. There were
also enormous snapping turtles.
Ostensibly I went there to fish. I took my spinning rod and
tackle box of artificial lures; I also took a short-handled net, which I had
modified into a long-handled one. This I used not for fish but to catch baby
turtles in the pond’s shallows, where they went to sun. I spent more time
catching turtles than fishing, in fact. Fishing interested me vaguely, and I
did catch a good many large-mouth bass, small-mouth trout, and bream from that
pond over the years. Mostly, though, it was the pond itself that attracted me;
as I collected its inhabitants, insofar as I did collect them, the pond
collected me.
At this point, we might segue into recollections of a
certain kind of bucolic childhood—boyhood in particular, as in that place and
time the fishing rod was one of the archetypes of rural boyhood. Most of the
time I left that item in the shade of the oak tree. I was after something
larger even than the ten-pound bass my father had once pulled out of that
water.
The movements of the surface of the water were for me a
source of endless fascination. There was no room in that pond for large-scale
turbulence. Had I grown up near an ocean, I would have absorbed a completely
different dynamic. The surface of the pond was subtle. It was responsive to
even the slightest movement of the air; but when the day was still, as it often
enough was at noon in July, the water assumed a near-perfect pellucidity. There
were rhythms of clarity and opacity, of reflection and refraction—of, you might
say, opening and closing—that I never tired of observing. Those rhythms obeyed
laws, obviously, but they were nevertheless thoroughly unpredictable,
syncopated in ways that I understood deep in my body, but which defeated my
mind’s ability to comprehend. Along the fixed margin of the dam, there was one
kind of clarity; along the mutable ragged edge of the shallows there was
another. I could glimpse the life beneath the water: turtle, crawfish, bream,
snake; I could also witness the life of the sky, both through reflections and
through the visitation of the sky’s representatives, particularly the tall
herons I often surprised (as they surprised me) wading the shallows, hunting.
Simultaneously a mirror and a lens, the water revealed its own world, and the
world outside itself. It was infinitely various, but its scale was, for me,
manageable. I fit there; I belonged.
I am convinced that every poet carries within him or herself
a cluster of process models which govern the nature and rhythm of how poems are
created and why. In myself, I can recognize three. One comes from the life of
the farm where I spent my childhood: in that model, one prepares the soil, one
scatters the seed, and then one waits, dependent on the vagaries of the weather
to make things happen. The second is musical (and obvious): the improvisatory
lessons learned from years of delving into performance within the flexible but
endlessly instructive parameters of the cluster of American musical forms that
have been a lifelong passion for me. The third model—and I have only recently
recognized its much more subtle operation in my psyche and in my poetic
practice—comes from the life of that small pond: its fixed margin, its flexible
ragged right, its simultaneous revelation of a life within and a life without,
its subtle alteration of the spectrum of the clear and the opaque, reflection
and refraction, opening and closing.
Once I caught a smallish bream. I ran my stringer through
its gill and tossed it back into the water, tethering it to the bank. Then I
lost it: half forgot about it, and couldn’t locate where I’d affixed it to the
ground. Distracted by my own meditations, I left it there. Six months later, in
the height of winter, I found it again. It had died, of course, and so had the
big snake that had swallowed it. When I pulled my stringer in from the water, I
found the two skeletons attached, one inside the other, an elaborate sculpture,
perfectly familiar and yet completely strange, a natural supernaturalism, or,
as Stevens called it, the motive for metaphor,
the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
