In Broken Country

by David Wagoner

Book of poems.

Genres: Poetry

109 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

What do you think about when you think about broken country? The poet is talking about the West, which is defined differently; is the Pacific Northwest part of the West? Colorado? I think we can all agree the Rockies is its own metaphor as is the lush Pacific Northwest or the canyonlands of Utah. I didn’t love these poems to my shock, and it took me a while to realize this was why: my mind wasn’t sure what he was talking about, this broken country. I concede that all of the West is more broken into pieces, say, than Massachusetts, but I just wasn’t in love with his metaphors and imagery speaking of my beloved West. I think he doesn’t love it. I think he loves his Pacific Northwest (and I love there too!) but never found the magic in the grand canyon country, or in the desert.

But, as a historical poet, there is a feel to some of the poems that is important, I sense it in poems of “American nostalgias” that Harold Bloom says touches “one of the deepest currents” of what it means to have been an American in the decades prior that just aren’t my taste.

WALKING IN BROKEN COUNTRY

Long after the blossoming of mile-wide, fire-breathing roses
In this garden of dead gods when Apache tears
Burst out of lava
And after the crosshatched lightning and streambeds cracking
Their sideslips through mid-rock, after burnishing wind,
Your feet are small surprises:
Lurching down clumps of cinders, unpredictably slipshod,
and gaining your footholds by the sheerest guesswork,
you make yourself at home
By crouching, by holding still and squinting to puzzle out
How to weave through all this rubble to where you’re going
Without a disaster…
In this broken country
The shortest distance between two points doesn’t exist.
Here straight lines are an abstraction, an ideal
Not even to be hoped for…
_______________________________
AFTER THE SPEECH TO THE LIBRARIANS

I was speaking to the Librarians,
And now I’m standing at the end of a road,
Having taken a wrong turn going home.
I don’t remember what I said.
Something about reading and writing
And not enough about listening and singing.
---
And the Librarians are going back to their books
In hundreds and hundreds of schools where children
Will be reading and writing and keeping quiet
Maybe and listening to how not to be so childish.
---
When I wasn’t looking, a hawk flew suddenly,
Skimming the field, effortlessly graceful, tilting
And scanning at low-level…
And goes on soaring, slanting downhill
His lungs holding the same air
As mine and the Librarians’
With which we all might sing for the children.
____________

CLOUDBURST

When the sky burst, I was caught far down the treeless meadow
Beside a river rushing no harder now than the rain
Drenching the slope as if all air, out of its airy bluster,
Had changed half into water and fallen, end over cloudy end.

It beat the bushes and reeds and me and thistles and rushes
And shook and shivered us all, pelting the smooth river
And pouring till I was a gasping salmon under a waterfall
Stunned and stranded on moss. Then it abruptly it ended.

And there in the newly made, steaming, streaming sunlight
The black-and-gilt goldfinches came to the thistle crowns,
Dipping and lilting with their interrupted wingbeats
From flowerhead to purple flowerhead half-gray with seed,

Zigzagging short and quick as moths and clinging sideways
To the stalks till both bent upside down, spilling over
And over their one brief call for each other to seek and find
Everywhere whatever they wished for under their gold world.

I held as still as a bittern or a stump, waiting to learn
Anything: they paid me no more mind than the rain
As they fed and darted away over the prickly, impassable field,
Singing, leaving me heavy-footed and bare-handed.
_________________

AN ADDRESS TO WEYERHEUSER, THE TREE-GROWING COMPANY
---
Mr. Weyerheuser, your fallers and heavy thinkers..[made these clearcuts.]

I realize June is a distracting month: you must trap and kill

All those ravenous black bears whose berries haven’t ripened

And who maul and gnaw a few of your billions of your saplings

And you’re looking forward to spraying the already dying

Tussock moths again, regardless of our expense, regardless

Of what else may be trying to live under the branches,

But for a moment consider troglodytes troglodytes, this wren

Who has never forged a treaty or plotted a war

Or boasted of trying to serialize massacre after massacre

Or managed a forest … this creature smaller than your thumb

And much more subtle is singing all day

In the woods you haven’t clear-cut yet. Each song

Lasts seven seconds and forever. Think what you might manage

To move if you could sing or even listen.
_______________________
READING THE LANDSCAPE

You sit and breathe, scanning the raw illusions of distance
And nearness for the lay of this land, depending
On what you are,
A pivot casting the only restless shadow for miles.
Far off the horizon traces its own downfall-
Mountainous once,
The wrack of living seas, steep fire, a storming of stones,
Now slowly settling for less under the weather,
That fearless explorer
Of weakness in the bindings of mind and matter.
---
You feel strangely at home
In the visible world, a place called Here and There, on the seat
Of kings…deluded
Into thinking you’re not lost
At the heart of this bewilderment. Your only shelters
Are half-shut eyes and a shut mouth…
Your duties are to rest and be recreated, then to stand,
Ignoring all directions
But your own, and to exercise your freedom of chance by aiming
Somewhere, keeping a constant Here beside you…
_______________________
GETTING THERE

You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You’re there. You’ve arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
What did you want
To be? You’ll remember soon. You feel like tinder
Under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change. The sky is pulsing
Against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you’ve made a lasting impression
On the self you were
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power,
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.
What have you learned so far? You’ll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveller’s dream
Under the last hill
Where though the night you’ll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.
You’ve earned this…
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything.
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you’re standing again and breathing, beginning now,
Journey without regret…
__________________
WATERFALL

It plunges into itself, stone-white, mottled with emerald
And finished falling forever, it goes on
Falling, half rain, to a pool
In bedrock and turns, extravagantly fallen, to recover
Its broken channel though maple and maidenhair
But always falling
Again, again, the same water, having been meanwhile
Everywhere under the moon, salted and frozen,
Thawed and upraised
Into its cloudy mother-of-pearl feathers to gather
Against the mountains, foregathering its own
And streaming once more
To fall as it must fall at the verge of understanding
In a roaring downpour as strange as this very moment
Swept over and over.