My Meadow
| Well, it's still the loveliest meadow in all Vermont. I believe that truly, yet for years have hardly seen it, I think, having lived too long with it — until I went to clean up the mess of firewood left by the rural electric co-op when they cut my clump of soft maples "threatening" their lines, this morning, the last day of September. My maple leaves were spilled in the grass, deep crimson. I worked with axe and chainsaw, and when I was done I sat on my rock that had housed my fox before the state executed him on suspicion of rabies, and then I looked at my meadow. I saw how it lies between the little road and the little brook, how its borders are birch and hemlock, popple and elm and ash, white, green, red, brown, and gray, and how my grass is composed in smooth serenity. Yet I have hankered for six years after that meadow I saw in Texas near Camp Wood because I discovered an armadillo there and saw two long-tailed flycatchers at their fantastic mating dance in the air. Now I saw my meadow. And I called myself all kinds of a blind Yankee fool — not so much for hankering, more for the quality of my looking that could make me see in my mind what I could not see in my meadow. However, I saw my serviceberry tree at the edge of the grass where little pied asters, called Farewell- to-Summer, made a hedge, my serviceberry still limping from last winter's storms, and I went and trimmed it. The small waxy pointed leaves were delicate with the colors of coral and mallow and the hesitating blush of the sky at dawn. When I finished I stepped over my old fence and sat by my brook on moss sodden from last night's rain and got the seat of my britches wet. I looked at my brook. It curled over my stones that looked back at me again with the pathos of their Paleozoic eyes. I thought of my discontents. The brook, curled in its reflections of ferns and asters and bright leaves, was whispering something that made no sense. Then I closed my eyes and heard my brook inside my head. It told me — and I saw a distant inner light like the flash of a waterdrop on a turning leaf — it told me maybe I have lived too long with the world. _______________ Hayden Carruth If You Call This Cry A Song Countryman Press 1983 
HC once took me up to his meadow, and his large garden, all along his brook ("Foote") that also ran by his house, a place Susan and I found by guessing "that's where a poet might live" and by golly we were right, it was 1974 and we would spend our honeymoon, unannounced, at the home of Hayden and Rose Marie Carruth. They were that generous and we were that silly & young. During that same visit, or another one, Hayden and I hiked the dirt road his house was on, and it was a round hike that went around Marshall's farm, a good friend of the poet. We walked in the night since Hayden worked through the night. I always felt "My Meadow" somehow encompassed every poem Hayden wrote.
[ BA ]
|
