Meet the Poet! (Sort of.)

Okay, a number of you have met me already. (Hello, friends-and-relations!) If you haven’t, or if it’s been a while, read these two poems and you’ll have no problem picking me out of any crowd. Pinkie-swear.

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Woman in a Garden

Hands still as leaves among the lavender and basil,
she sifts rich earth, seeking the root of sense.
Vines weave walls around her, and the grass
roots deep under her feet; she sits dreaming
of a poem in which a woman,
dreaming of a poem, sits in a garden
where vines rise against sun-bricked walls,
pools of grass ripple and deepen, and flowers,
contained and passionate as sonnets, wait,
cradling their seeds, for the earth's embrace.
She is a seed, she who sits like a flower
in a garden in a poem, with earth-kissed feet,
herb-scented fingers, and her mouth
stained with similes; the poem too,
cradling the woman in her garden, is a flower
that its own seed contains; a thousand flowers
blossomed and died, to be the earth
where this seed falls.

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Self-Portrait
(Oak Tree at the Bishop's Ranch, Healdsburg, California)

The roots dig deep, unseen. What truth the roots have gathered
rises now living in this gnarled and years-around trunk,
massive and whole to a tall man's height, until
first one great limb lifts, then another, each unfolding branches,
each branch its twigs, ragged now in November
with crumples of crispening leaves.
                                                                 In every twilight,
every dusk and dawn, its silhouette spread
in webs of clumsy lace across uncolored sky,
the tree begins to flutter and speak - half-seen flickers
of leaf-brown wings, drowsy trills, quick liquid riffs
swinging from branch to branch, staccato runs
of tics and chirps drawing each a circle
around this perch, this twig. Darkness grows,
or light; sleep quiets the branches,
or the day's need empties them. The tree stands silent,
massive and living, rooted and risen,
until the light shifts, until it sings again.

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“Woman in a Garden” has a special place in my heart. I wrote it when I was in my mid-twenties, toward the end of a three- or four-year spell in which my poetic voice had worked past its adolescent quavers and begun to find its grownup rhythm and range. The poem is rooted partly in some planting that my then-landlord and another tenant had started in back of his house, and partly in my own quiet exhilaration at glimpsing what I might actually be capable of as a poet. And you can tell that I wrote it in my twenties because it idealizes both those elements to the hilt - turning a patch of new grass and a spindly baby tree into an archetypal garden, and making an absolutely breathtaking earth-goddess out of a young, conflicted poet who could barely allow herself to claim and be claimed by her creative powers. And I am so proud of that young poet, because - idealistic or not - this is quite the piece of work she managed to create here.

“Self-Portrait” was written, well, just a few weeks ago - so, several decades (let’s not go on about how many) after the first poem. This one is, well, less dreamy. It celebrates deep roots, strength and stability, age and girth and the reach that can come with them, the creative power of standing still and paying attention. It has this in common with “Woman in a Garden”: both have a figure at the center, full of life and full of quiet and part of a landscape in which a lot of other life is, in a quiet way, going on. That says something - you tell me what - about how I would define a poet’s role in the human/natural landscape. The transformation of the central figure from the breathtaking earth-goddess to the “massive and living” oak tree says something, maybe, about how my perceptions of power and beauty have shifted over several decades. I wouldn’t have written “Self Portrait” in my twenties; I wouldn’t write “Woman in a Garden” the same way, now, that I did then. But - and - I’m glad to have written them both.

So, any time you’re trying to spot me in a crowd: I’m the one who looks like a cross between an earth-goddess and an oak tree. See how simple? Come up and introduce yourself, I’ve been hoping we’d meet.