The day our little paradise on the Elk River in Maryland was ruined, I sat on our deck, turned my face to the wall and cried. The strip of land behind us, the viney, drapey, wooded path to the Elk River that we thought of as our own, was obliterated by buyers of the house behind and to the right of us. Soon there were ATVs roaring just beyond our back yard. Which reminds me of what’s just happened locally behind the airport.
First Costco ripped out a forest of trees, home to countless creatures, then the airport took almost all the rest. What’s going, what’s gone. It’s hard to write anything but elegy lately. How about if I write elegies for poems that didn’t ever make it into a book, or even into print? Well, not elegies, but the poems themselves. Well, maybe not the poems as they were but how they are after I fiddle with them some more. I have more poetic sense than I once did, I hope. Let this be my probably insignificant contribution toward improving the landscape. The Path Our boundary-path’s filled up with fallen leaves, barely an indentation, with butterflies. We’ve been breaking through spider webs, ducking limbs, not letting our thoughts end at the property line,where on Tuesday a loaded gravel truck clanks, nothing to soften it, everythingruined. Still, we watch out the glass doors, fascinated by the clear white strip,the aforementioned Italian opera of a clanking truck. We are tilted, overturned,slammed down on the line. This is all we get, then. We think how to be, how to playdisaster a little elegantly, Tosca and Cavaradossi, lives circumscribed by our ownpersonal crash of fate, not the old scrim of insects and squirrels, but the ravenous swath,the chain-saw massacre that leaves us nose- to-nose, artfully posed, wet cheeked. However, if you want cheering up, you should check out the poems of Ross Gay. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, is stunning and, well, cheerful. In a good way, meaning honest and filled with shadow as well. And then he has gone and done it again in essays, a collection that just came out called The Book of Delights. He revels in things, odd things, people things, creature things.Joy and sorrow, all mixed up. You can’t pull apart the strands (as if there were strands) and hold just one.