mccarthyism

7.15.2014

The house is quiet, and cool for July. As a southerner I am always especially grateful for this. The curtains billow gently behind the fan; outside the air is still and strangely heavy. The Metra tolls faintly from the station. Jenni goes to bed and the children sleep behind their door.

I read from Seamus Heaney’s “Field Work” and am amazed at his clarity and precision, at the perfect aptness of every metaphor. You learn to trust him, not only to lead you inevitably right to the crux of the matter – and to do it with flawless diction and imagery – but also to value the right things: home, nature, language, history, moral choice. It’s similar to the way I feel about Richard Wilbur, but Heaney has the advantage of being so distinctly from somewhere, of having a permanent setting for his poems that gives them their overriding aesthetic. You can try to manufacture an aesthetic like that but Heaney’s has that unmistakeable whiff of legitimacy to it. It invites you in.

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

The mildest February for twenty years

Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound

Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

Now the good life could be to cross a field

And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe

Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense

And I am quickened with a redolence

Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,

My ghosts come striding into their spring stations

The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

posted by ethan # 7/15/2014 01:34:00 AM

mccarthyism

7.15.2014

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