WILDFLOWERS & WEEDS
It’s supposed to be raining –
low spinning off the coast,
sucking southern moisture up
through thirsty California where
it’s been a perfect year
for grass in the foothills.
Yesterday’s soft horses groaning,
men bemoaning
the size of Frank Ainley’s calves.
Most understocked
with the price of hay –
white forget-me-nots
claim the lightly grazed
as poppies topping ridges
burn holes in green.
Low snow, slow rain
more days than not
saturating February
with little runoff,
a warm storm could
test reservoirs and prayers
for the Valley all week.
Daylight drizzles on tall
nettles in the garden, drips
upon the first brass trumpets
of an orchestra of fiddleneck
jamming corners of the orchard.
Horehound spreads each
persistent, pungent leaf
to gather moisture
in the pasture –
a man may need
to spray weeds more
than write poetry.
22.Feb.2009
Perhaps not strictly a cultural phenomenon, but cattle and rural natives tend to complain, it seems, even in the light of plenty. No exception, I wonder if the negativity validates our activities as work, as an Anglo-Puritan stamp of approval. We come from stock that has had to tough it out, as many agricultural families continue to do – and many survive on guts and stoic toughness alone to become a model to perpetuate.
I dare say, it may work for awhile, but not indefinitely. Now after 20-some years of gathering to recite cowboy poetry, a few among us discuss how we were motivated to work when we were younger – many stories are far from pretty, and for the most part unnecessary unless we consider the value of getting beyond those attitudes and constraints. But we also know many good and often sensitive folks that folded under that kind of pressure, people that may have otherwise excelled. Too often, however, the real issue becomes economic.
The other side of the luxury of work is satisfaction. Learning to plan, enjoying each step of the process and allowing appropriate basking in the finished product, depending on the details that need to be improved. Pound and Snyder’s ‘pattern is not far off’. I am still learning, different season after different season – the poetry not far off.
AXE HANDLES
One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet.
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet-head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.”
And I say to Kai
“Look: we’ll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with — ”
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It’s in LuJi’s W’en Fu, fourth century
A.D. “Essay on Literature” —in the
Preface: “In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.”
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft and culture,
How we go on.
- Gary Snyder
from “Axe Handles” (North Point Press, 1983.)