The Wilderness Between

10/26/09 4:30pm

My place is yellow now. The leaves, the same color as pineapple, drift down as the wind shakes the branches. They all go about the falling in a different manner. Some ride the wind, drifting gently downwards. Others plummet, falling quickly, efficiently. Still others spin and dance, like a helicopter, like a minuet. I wonder how I would fall. If I could be so graceful in death.

Now the ivy is riddled with yellow leaves, bursting from between the tendrils like delicate blossoms. Still, the ivy is green.

I think that the leaves feel different than from when I was young. Back then, they were better made. Crunchy and brittle. Papery and thin. They would claw at the pavement when the wind pushed, scraping, skittering across the space. These leaves feel plastic, rubbery. They bend and flex, decaying with the moisture they still hold even in death instead of lingering like their dried predecessors of my youth, like mummies.

I suspect this must have something to do with annual precipitation. Or the fact that the leaves that fall now have died young. The leaves that still cling to the trees will become brittle before the wind finally plucks them from their twigs; these leaves will be crunchy and ripe with age.

When I was younger, I used to examine the skeletons of the crunchy leaves. There was a certain technique. You first crunched the leaf in your fist, grinding it between your fingers, letting the little flakes fall from your hand. When you opened your fingers, you would find the spine, the arteries, the muscles still left, still mostly connected. You could unfurl the leaf again, and hold it up. Its basic shape was still there. Bits of the brittle flesh still clung to the skeleton like a shattered windshield. When the wind picked up these skeletons though, they were as quiet as dust; I’d hurried the process.

I noticed yesterday while walking to work that the school must clean up the leaves, regularly, as they fall. I could see the shapes, the half stars of the leaves on the sidewalk. The shapes they left were the deep brown of rot. I was glad that my shiny, beetle black work shoes were kept clean. But first, I was sad. Sad that none of the shapes the leaves had traced were whole, nor would they ever be because of the efficient facilities staff.

Still, I am glad that the tortuous days of raking leaves are at least postponed for me. I always hated raking. My family always let the leaves pile up. We only raked when it was cold. We only raked when the leaves were soggy and brown, half-rotted with weeks of morning condensation and rain. As a child, it was always my job to be the scooper. While my parents raked, gathering the leaves into a pile, while my sister opened large brown bags, so large that she put them over her head, letting them fall to her feet, getting inside to open them, it was my job to scoop. To gather the wet, dead leaves into my arms and lay them to rest in the body-sized brown bags.

I plant it

as if it were a piece of my mother

I really enjoyed reading this packet and book of nature themed poetry. It was interesting to me the ways in which the authors approached the subjects. Just as in essays, they could rant, reminisce of their own memories in nature, connect their personal experiences with nature, reflect on the beauty and complexity they see around them. However, I still enjoyed the same sort of tactic that I like in essays: relating nature back to the self/ personal, meaningful experiences.

I think some of the best examples of this were in The Journals of Scheherazade. Particularly the one poem, “No Tomatoes”, is so tender and heart-felt. The details of the speaker’s care of the tomatoes, her failure to stimulate either the plants or her marriage. It is so heart-breaking. The image of “masturbating/ each flower with a Q-tip” or “walking around at night like a thief/ with a flashlight”. And I’m completely swept by the admission at the end:

But there is nothing

like desire here, nothing

like a warm tomato picked almost

overripe off the vine, so red

you could cry, so full of juice

and flavor that salt and pepper

seem heresy.

No, there are no tomatoes here, no one to tell

me why, and I don’t know

what kind of interference

it will take

to want each other again.

The poem starts with the tomato plants, comes to the couple, then back to the tomatoes, and the last line reveals the couple again. Yet it is very sneaky, seeming seamless. The last line especially. “Each other”

I think these poems really made me think again about how we as humans relate to the world, and some of these poems even dealt with that directly. Like “For A Coming Extinction,” which was also one of my favorites. It speaks with bitterness and sarcasm about how we are destroying the world, wiping out whole species. And it is so moving. Actually, when I say that I mostly mean the first half. I wish the poem had ended at that first page, after two stanzas. It loses its momentum after that I think.

And “Walk in Tick Season” made me almost even like ticks. I think this is a good example of a poem that celebrates nature, but doesn’t get too purple or glittery. An example of a poem that fails is “A Blessing”. I really dislike this poem. I had seen it before in a beginning poetry class and it made me want to gag. Bleh.

I don’t like “A Blessing” because first of all, it’s a poem about ponies with eyes that “darken with kindness”. The ponies themselves “can hardly contain their happiness” and “love each other”. It’s like My Little Ponies with rainbows and sunshine everywhere. I will admit to a good detail: “And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear/ That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” This moment is so sensual.

The line that eludes me in this poem that I dislike so much is “There is no loneliness like theirs.” It is put right after telling us that they love each other. It is simply stated. It is a quiet moment that I want to hold on to and explore. I don’t know what he means, nor does he try to explain or dwell here. Instead, he moves on to eating grass contentedly. Everything so happy and god damned content again. I don’t like it. I don’t trust it.

If nature poems have taught me anything, it’s to mistrust that front of happiness and beauty. Hummingbirds and tomatoes are sex. Wisteria is death. A tick, a vulture, and torn and mutilated fish are beautiful.

Here I am. The steps again. I’m glad the weather has warmed. I was not quite ready for fall. My trees here are still mostly green. I hear from second years that the trees at Chatham change all at once. One day, I’ll walk up my steps and nothing will be green. Oranges, reds, yellows, browns, maybe, probably. But no green.

I am interested in watching how fall treats my ivy. I wonder if I will watch it brown. More likely, I expect that it will be green until the snow covers it, but once the snow melts away, the ivy will be gone or brown. Some part of me suspects that the ivy is actually inching into itself. I seem to feel that it was a wider patch last time I sat here. Perhaps I will make a marker to see if the ivy really is shrinking.

I’ve been finding wildness in the strangest places lately. I mean, there’s this piece of wildness between campus and home. There’s the large “weeds” that have sprung up between two plates of concrete in front of my apartment building. And then there’s my friend’s fishtank.

I am not a friend to fish. I had many as a child, and they all, without exception, died. Because I didn’t realize—and I guess my parents didn’t either—that you had to change the water out. All my fish suffocated in their own feces. How terrible. I hope hell is kinder than me.

But my friend is a meticulous fish keeper. He keeps a constant level of water. He cleans the tank weekly. He buys the expensive fish food, and even little fish snacks. Recently, he bought a second tank to keep crawdads in to feed his fish. Now, I thought these were just regular house goldfish. I mean, sure they were black and blue and orange with electric accents, but they were in a tank. How wild could they be?

They are savage.

The first crawdad was eaten by eleven fish in four days. (The fish were still young, still remembering their hunting instincts.)

The second crawdad, significantly larger, was slowly eaten. They were cruel. First, the fish bit and pulled off its claws. Then, slowly, they picked off its legs and antennae. After that, they left the crawdad on its back for two days; all it could do was blink, wave it proboscis in the water, and wait for death.

It was horrifying. For two days, I checked on the poor crawdad at regular intervals, hoping that one of the fish in the tank had had the decency to put it out of its misery. But, no. On the third day, the crawdad was simply gone. A few pieces of its picked-clean exoskeleton drifting along the bottom of the tank were all that remained of that poor crawdad.

When I asked my friend why he fed his fish live crawdads, he told me that he thought it important to let his fish keep at least some of their natural wildness. And I really admired this answer. I had never thought of fish in a tank as wild. But they really are brutal. I still may not like fish, but I respect them now. Damn.

Mary Oliver’s Blue Iris was a very refreshing read after so many essays. I am not a poet myself, but I really enjoyed this collection. Her writing was excellent. It really captured the feel of these moments and sensations. Her work really reminded me of haiku. The essence or the feel of the work captures the “zen” of haiku, its gentleness and reflection. Too, her essays make you reconsider the thing itself as the poem goes on. Like “Touch Me Nots” or “Rice,” at the end of the poem, she comes back to the thing, and it has changed.

On the other hand, I admire her for not simply relying on the haiku, which is the traditional form (as far as I, the fiction writer, know) of combining poetry and nature. But there are still those passages that steal my breath. In “Touch Me Nots”: “a little raccoon inside/ praying,/ as it felt, over and over,/ the mesh of its capture”.

This image really stuck with me. The vulnerability it invokes, the helplessness. I think she gets this by using “little”, “praying”, and the repetition of “over and over”. It’s lovely.

I think my favorite poems though were “Roses”, “Some Questions You Might Ask”, and “Black Oaks”. But even as I list them, I can’t help but remember the one about sunflowers. Or the one about…

I won’t discuss all of them here, but since “Roses” keeps coming back to me, I’ll look a little deeper.

The look on her face in a dream

Stayed with me all day

Like a promise I had failed.

Not that I had made any—

Not that I could remember—

But she was looking into the north

Where nothing lives but white clouds

Of crying birds, like bits of snow.

And the grass on which she was standing,

And the roses thick on the fences

Were soft and bright, able to renew themselves

As a woman, finally, cannot do.

First, I love that it starts with a dream. It makes the peaceful, sort of foggy details that come even better. Really, it is the third stanza that makes it. Oliver makes us look north, and then breaks, “where nothing lives”. Beautiful. Then white. Clouds of birds, snow. Gorgeous. And then I really love how the story comes back around to the woman and the promise. The last line really rings with such finality. Probably because of that word. Final. And Cannot.

I’m not sure that my poetry is quite up to par to be able to ramble off even a draft of a poem right now. However, I can share my personal experience with roses, and we can pretend that it is crafted well enough to be a lyrical essay.

When my mother moved into her own house after the divorce, she began to take gardening very seriously. She went to the gardening store at the end of the street every weekend to pick up some new bud, or seed. After some time, I prevailed upon her to try roses. I was probably twelve and fancied myself to be like Belle from “Beauty and the Beast,” and so I wanted roses. I thought that this would be my break into gardening, and I was determined to grow beautiful red roses.

My mother bought two bushes for me and, catching my excitement, helped me plant them. Romantics, both of us, we planned to coax them over the dilapidated shed in our backyard. However, the bushes were not what I expected. They looked more like gnarled fingers pinching at the ground rather than the beautiful plants I had seen in books. My mother and I took extra care of the plants. Every afternoon, once my mom came home from work, we would survey the bushes, trying to read their signs.

However, despite all of our care and our desire, the bushes withered and died in front of us. We watched as the few leaves that had come attached, became brown and brittle. The petals of the few buds that had initially taken shape wilted and withered. Instead of a lesson on gardening and life, the bushes became an instruction on death.

I really fond Paul Theroux’s essay, “Lighting Out,” to be extremely well written and organized. The way he captures Cairo in his interactions with the civilians is amazing. Personally, it took me back to Greece where I had a similar experience with cabdrivers and the general local tourism.

I really enjoyed the use of the phrase “inshallah” throughout the essay. I liked how it rounded the piece, and changed meaning for the author as the story progressed.

However, I’m not sure that I would have called this piece “nature writing.” This seems to me to be more about place in general than the other pieces we have focused on so far. Even in the desert, he focuses more on the Sphinx and historical aspects rather than the land itself. In the city, he focuses on the people. Too, his discussion of Africa seems entirely focused on culture, history, and people and not so much the land itself. He wasn’t worried about erosion, or the struggles farmers have with the ever growing desert. Theroux focuses on war, famine, and disease instead.

I’m sure that there is much more reflection on nature later in the book, but this particular chapter, while well crafted and fascinating, seemed more people based.

Then again, as we’ve often discussed in class, how can you separate nature from people and still have human readers become invested? The people of Africa as well seem particularly tied to their country. For example, we rarely discuss the individual nations of Africa. In Western news and media at least, we only talk about the whole continent. And with all of the disease, corruption, and general suffering, the people are stuck.

Perhaps this is a particular case where the people become the place, and the place becomes the people. It is impossible to separate one from another. Cowboys make the West. Farmers make the mid-West. Old money and big business makes the East. Movie stars make Los Angeles.

I think that in class, we have discussed a lot about twining people and place to make place more palatable and relatable to people. We have talked about it as a tool. But how about more simply, place is people; people is place?

In Theroux’s essay, we see the cab drivers and the desert. Forget wars, famine, rampant AIDs, and focus on the land. The desert itself is harsh and inhospitable, and the Nile River Valley only flourishes after the flood. To get through the more lean times, any survivor would learn to take advantage of the good times to get through the bad. To do what they could to survive.

I think we see this even now in the cab drivers as they smile while swindling you. These are desperate times for Africa as a whole, and the drivers have simply found some of the most effective ways of taking what they can. 1) Most important is friendliness because otherwise no one will want to do business with you. 2) Foreigners don’t know how things work or how much things cost, so adding a little extra (especially because they have so much) won’t be a problem. And 3) If you are persistent enough, or tell them about your eleven children and their hungry bellies, the foreign customer will more likely give in and even feel good about giving you their money.

Fall has come. The air is crisp with a chill that already steals into your bones if you let it. But I’ll pull my coat a little closer to keep warm.

With fall, death has come, both figurative and literal. Brown leaves skitter across the wood, and corpses of bees lie strewn up and down the steps. The spiders have taken the hint and have abandoned their webs, leaving their homes to the merciless autumn wind. Only my ivy remains vibrantly green, stretching its roots into the warm earth.

I’ve never noticed how the leaves in the trees sound different once fall comes. When the trees rustle in summer, it sounds like they are whispering secrets to each other like children in their tree forts. Or maybe they are chuckling, basking in the sun. But in fall, the rustle sounds more like a shiver. Sounds more like an old man shaking the cold from his bones.

Then again, perhaps the sounds themselves don’t change; rather, the crispness, the coolness, the thinness of the air now changes the sound as it hits my ears.

There is a new sound too, besides the wind. The squirrels have come to life in these parts now that a chill has set in. Now, I see them everywhere, hear them chattering and romping across the tin roof, scurrying to fill their underground stores before the first snow falls.

It is interesting to me, the way I can categorize the places I’ve lived by the squirrels.

In St. Louis, the squirrels are bigger than in Pittsburgh, but nearly all of them are grey. They are more skittish than most because of our pets. They are also known as bullies around the birdfeeders; scavengers, they take where they can and as much as they can until their food source is taken away by angry bird fans.

Galesburg had the biggest squirrels I had ever seen and ever hope to see. They practically ran the campus. They were big and fat, and their coloring was fantastic: a sort of reddish brown. They are mostly friendly, but I know more than a few students who have been bullied by pushy squirrels. One of the most memorable sights I saw on Knox’s campus was a squirrel, running through the grass with half of a bagel in its mouth and some angry student shouting after it.