Sometimes the light through the leaves feels a message. A message from whom concerning what is unclear but you feel the urgency of the transmission. These leaves aren’t just leaves. They quiver there in the stillness like a gentle curiosity, observing, expecting a candid reply.

                  This is not a crazed or hallucinatory state. The moment couldn’t be more usual or you more alert. It’s Sunday morning so the stillness permits this pause. You may wonder why you have not paused more in your life. If you’re me this wonder recalls Thoreau.

                  The poem below vivifies such an instant. That verb vivify doesn’t do justice, but I couldn’t locate a better. I tried so many I almost lost the feeling I was attempting to describe. Thinking interrupts feeling. Feeling doesn’t think, doesn’t want to, pleads to be left alone. Prayer functions similarly when intense. You pray so hard you almost cease to exist and wake blinking as from a dream. Where have you been? Elsewhere, but where? 

                  That, as I read it, is the theme of James Wright’s amazing poem. The poet is not asleep. He’s lying in his hammock alone in a friend’s yard. It is still. The sun is shining. He is not “doing anything” – anything he could tell – but he’s not doing nothing either. He is seeing. This seeing is an activity as fierce and fulfilling as any action. It’s like prayer – only with prayer one is conceiving what isn’t and here the poet’s imbibing what so loudly is. Imbibing and loudly are as bad as vivify but I am struggling here to express without crimping into pedantry. Among the commonplaces I deplore is “You get the idea.” For someone in the expressing racket that’s a cowardly white flag. Keep trying, I prod myself, keep trying.

                  I’m guessing Wright’s poem came to him instantly, as is, without the intervention of circumspection. It feels that way – given, not made. Nothing that he notes from the infinitude around him is remarkable, but the effect of their arrangement is almost spooky in its glow. Our eyes are more efficient witnesses than our tongues. Every seen element tells truly. Language approximates, analogizes, stutters, compares, “It was like, you know…” 

                  Note there are no metaphors in Wright’s poem to divert our attention (except that every word we use is metaphoric in origin – but that’s a discussion that really removes us from a vivid outdoor scene into a dimly lit classroom). The butterfly is bronze, the tree trunk is black. “Like a leaf,” though technically a metaphor isn’t really, rather evidence of momentary uncertainty whether this observed object is animate or vegetal. Every detail is placed exactly in space and time. He even maps (over, down, between, to my right… one wonders, in passing, whether the directional “right” is also the recording “Wright”).

                  No scene could be more familiar, less strange, less predictive of an epiphany. Maybe Saul felt this way en route to Damascus, relaxing into his humdrum, same-old/same-old, then uh-oh, that terrible lightning bolt of inquiry, more terrible for being so unexpected. Our poet – and we – have been having a grand old time relaxing in the pretty field, observing butterflies, pine trees, old horseshit alchemizing into gold (how cool is that!), and that gliding, protein-seeking chickenhawk, high above, “looking for home,” then whammo!

“I have wasted my life.” 

                  We halt, shocked. You were having such a nice afternoon, Mr. Poet, Mr. Human, what in blazes went wrong! Those leaves became messengers, delivering a terrible message, which in our busyness we contrive to overlook.

                  I ask myself, Have I wasted my life?

                  Gulp.

* 

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota 

James Wright (1927-1980)

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   
Down the ravine behind the empty house,   
The cowbells follow one another   
Into the distances of the afternoon.   
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.