From the neolithic

He needs walking the way a carpenter needs a hammer and wood, but the walks are growing shorter.
“It’s terribly hard,” his wife Kitty observes.
“So frustrating. He thinks best when his legs are moving. He believes to have an idea, it’s got to come from something tangible, something he is a part of, something he sees.”

Thanks to my brother Steve for alerting me to this great portrait of the Welsh poet Leslie Norris, a long-time resident of Orem, Utah. I’m ashamed to admit I had nothing on my shelf by Norris – had never even read him, in fact. A visit to my favorite local used bookstore yesterday remedied this situation, though the book I picked up – Walking the White Fields: Poems 1967-1980 – is too brief, besides being two decades behind in its selection. Reading through it this morning, I was reminded most strongly of the Pennsylvania poet Harry Humes. There’s the same love of winter themes, the vision of the wild within the pastoral/domestic, the understated sense of dramatic occasion.

So for Earth Day, here’s a Norris poem about megaliths, which I’ll follow with one of Paul Zweig’s deathbed poems (from Selected and Last Poems, Wesleyan, 1989) on a similar theme.

THE TWELVE STONES OF PENTRE IFAN
by Leslie Norris

The wind
Over my shoulder
Blows from the cold of time.

It has
Shaped the hill,
It has honed the rock outcrops

With the
Granules of its
Rasping. When the old ones

Were born
They dropped in dark-
ness, like sheep, and hot animals

Howled for
The afterbirths.
I watched the great stones of

Faith they
Moved in the flickering
Mountains of their nameless

Lives, and
See once more the
Points of adjusted rock, taller

Than any
Man who will ever
Stand where I stand, lifting their hope

In still,
Huge stone, pointed
To the flying wind. The sea ebbs again,

And round
The endless brevity
Of the seasons the old men’s cromlech

Prepares
Its hard shadows.
The four great stones, elate and springing,

And the
Smaller stones, big
As a man, leaning in, supporting.

*

SKYWRITING
by Paul Zweig

White furrow on the sky for the seed that will not grow,
The laborious skywriting, like a child
Tracing his name in stabbing lines of letters:
Graffiti, pyramid, stone cross, footprint, haystack;
Or the farmer wielding the shoulder-bone of an ox,
Who first shoveled up the earth and planted
Barley, half-wild wheat; who let fall the seed
Of his cock, and sucked the black wound
Where the earth bled food. And the shell-heaps;
The fifty-ton stones turned on end;
The mounds to keep the dead from getting loose:
All those acts to keep life from getting out of hand,
The dead shells of deeds forming another kind of life.
The 120-foot-high earthen nipple of Silsbery
Took a hundred years to erect out of chalk blocks,
Rubble, and a fine skin of earth.
What a job for a handful of shepherds
Who also ploughed the soil in their season:
A laborious outcry, meaning here! Or a curse.
Curse the intractable earth, death, blindness, rotten teeth,
Arthritis, dead babies; curse winter, curse summer!
Can you hear me, heaven? Am I making enough noise
For you? Suck on this teat of dust and rock.
I’m dying down here, and I want you to hear
The sound of it. It is called scream in the night,
It is called earth tit and Stone Henge,
It is called language,
It is called the sleeplessness of the gods.

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