A sunny, cool morning, definitely mid-May. I’m just finishing my morning cup of coffee, which has become look warm as I savour it. With Jennie away for the week, Nori wanted cuddles as soon as I got up: now she is sitting behind me in the window, drinking in the sights, sounds, and aromas of spring through the open window. The grass in the field, which was mowed a couple of days ago, is already six inches high and the wooded verge is thick with new leaves and birdsong.
I’ve been reading The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, by Stanley Kunitz (with Genine Lenine). It’s a thin volume, filled with wisdom and life, and I find I must take it in in small bites. It was written when he was 100 and still gardening and writing poetry. (So much for the axiom that one should not write poetry after age eighty.) He had just recovered from a serious illness which left him revitalized and hungry for life; he died later that year.
Kunitz takes us into his gardens, long marriage (his wife had passed shortly before he wrote this book), and his thoughts about poems and poetry, circling and spiralling around the relationship between empathy, identifying with all of creation, and joy. Near the book’s conclusion he simply sates that he remains deeply embedded in his senses, poetry, and relationship, and as hungry for the world as ever.
Kunitz was deeply aware of the unravelling of nature, although the situation in 2005 was far less dire than that we now face. Still, he knew that his insistence on building and maintaining gardens that were both planned and wild, and that welcomed in Nature were somehow acts of fierce, and joy filled, resistance to ravenous, rapacious, capitalism.
In the end, Kunitz believes, and quietly insists, that we and the garden are simply Nature, and that remembering that offers a sort of lasting salvation.
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
Copyright Credit: Stanley Kunitz, “End of Summer” from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1953 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2002)ShareMore About This Poem
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