by Harold Rhenisch
It has been asked: “What is poetry for?” The poet Sidney Graham asked a related question: “What are the words using us for?”
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Perhaps to set the question aside. Before scientific enquiry unified with its technical tools of dissection, the energy that nuclear engineers are attempting to create in machines was understood in living contexts. In the case of a peach tree, the tension of photons that had escaped from the sun’s gravitational pull against the ancient tension of water molecules from the edge of interplanetary space was expressed as shadow infused with yellow light.
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It still is. Anyone who has ever sat beneath a peach tree has been caught in this tension between balance and restlessness, and knows it. It’s likely that a few wasps will be hanging around. Everything around you is rustling and fluttering, even your heart.
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In the case of a pear tree, this character is expressed as a shadow that cuts through the brightest air, knife-sharp. Its story is written with water drawn up from deep clay soil. It carries heaviness with it, which opens into waxy, nearly impenetrable leather leaves. They turn purple and apricot orange as they age through the season. You could drown there and never resurface to the world.
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A man who wants to dream would do well to sleep under a pear tree in September, but a man who wants to act upon his unrealized desires would do better to sleep under a peach in July — or even just try. It might not be possible to actually sleep beneath a July peach tree. If you tried in November, you’d have to share that space with the snow. It might be better to can peaches in July, and in December to fetch a can opener, a bowl and a spoon, and to sit yourself down in reverence and have a body-to-body chat with them.
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Before unity was cracked apart, human identity was out there in the world: in a bluff across the river, in a pine tree shivering with light, in the rain, in the cherry trees knocking against a window, in skill with a grafting knife, in ability at throwing a pot on a wheel. After unity was cracked apart, humans walked through a dead earth: a memory of Eden, in one cultural garden, where to speak was to say the names of the animals, with no separation between perception and knowledge.
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This whole sense of unity with the world is called poetry now, although poetry is something far different: the tension between things that is also the tension within them; their grace. A robin nesting in the apricot tree in my garden, on the same limb year after year after year, is poetry. So, too is the way I pick every branch except for the one above her, which her mate hysterically defends, and from which a single green moon, an apricot, hangs above her head. Her chicks will be ready to fly from the nest she made with the shape of her breast when the apricot is ready to be reached up to with a sharp yellow beak: a ray of light.
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If you call this interleaved world metaphor, you are lost. Despite their efforts at reduplicating God’s separation of the waters above from the waters below to create dry land, as recorded in the Book of Genesis, the blacksmiths who created technological science out of spiritual science and left the spare angle iron for poetry to try to bring back together, had real frustrations. They saw that steam escapes from a kettle at such and such a velocity in relationship to the heat and the size of its spout, yet had to listen to spiritual experts explain that by calculating this energy they had violated the spiritual integrity of “a moment.” Others, poets perhaps, in the house for a moment to wash the sticky peach juice from their chins, explained that this steam was the god of the water transforming itself in order to flee from the heat. These were beautiful ideas, sure, but, well, ah…still, it frustrated them, right? The blacksmiths wanted to talk about valves and pipe diameter. They wanted to find a truth not limited by words but written in the energy-and-matter language of the universe, and they wanted to be able to say that the boiler pressure of a horse pulling a black carriage through the streets was 746 watts. They wanted to be able to coerce words into saying that steam was a way of transferring heat from one point to another but that in itself it had no spirit at all. A bluff, the air, the cherry tree, a crow flying through, and rain running down a leaf edge and a window pane were compressed into one package, called individual character. No more was spirit in the air, character in the structure of a wine, and a mood a component of a liquid that was mixed in vessels to produce specific elixirs, with specific spirits, moods and characters. Now men were building steam engines. A human body, with its thoughts and dreams; a wine cask with its civilization of yeasts; a basket woven of ponderosa pine needles, full of saskatoon berries and woven by the fingers for them in the shape of a mouth, to receive them; and a beaker full of hydrochloric acid were all the same, all vessels, in the mirror that individual character held up to itself: the dictionary. Along with whiskey casks, rain barrels, snuff boxes and honeypots.
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Notice the North American concept of the land, stitched together by steam engined trains: a vast, empty space, that can be settled, but remains bounded, forever, by emptiness. If you climb the over-grazed slopes of the Rattlesnake Hills above the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, you will have a view of the steam-and-graphite engines that heated the entire Columbia River a degree Fahrenheit along the low, sedimentary soils at the lower boundary of the ice sheets of the Wisconsin Glaciation. From the Rattlesnake, you can look across the Columbia River’s flow and personal watercraft, a gift to humans from the reactors overheating the river that now powers Ukraine’s naval drones. Over there are the ruined orchards and Sinkiuse camps of White Cliffs, the camps of the river people now exiled to the shrub steppe in Nespelem. Below you is one of the red mud gorges that spring melt has sliced down through the tracks of dune buggies and motorcycles skidding up to the old missile battery sites that once guarded the reactors below. You are kicking up radioactive dust as you scramble up, but then you have it: a view all the way to the stratovolcanoes of the Coast Range, stretching in an arc above the snow-capped peaks rimming the Pacific. You will be in the wilderness. It is a changed land, as industrial as the one settling in your lungs.It was once a garden of blue-bunched wheatgrass and antelope, meadowlarks and thrushes. It is now the home of the wind. No-one lives there.
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We can, if we become the wind.
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Harold Rhenisch is the author of The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle (Oskana Editions, 2024). It is a series of long poems of place and history, replacing Pound’s Cantos and Whitman’s Song of Myself with Cascadia and forty years of wandering across her scarps, screes, falls, plateaus, reaches and flows, listening, and writing down what his hands heard. It is his 33rd book.
The Woodlot 