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The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder with blunt round ends, a tooclass="underline" you know it when you feel the subtle central turn or curve that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands, year after year after year, by women’s hands that held it here, just where it must be held to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl and crush the seeds and rise and fall again setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song that worked itself at length into the stone, so when I picked it up it told me how to hold and heft it, put my fingers where those fingers were that softly wore it down to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand, this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.

DN: And it feels like the quote you have from Mary Jacobus, where she says that “the regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such things—to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees,” that perhaps this regulated speech is a form of technology also, to aid us in moving toward fellowship or contemplation.

UKL: I don’t know if you can call language “technology.” Technology is really involved with tools. Language is something we emit and we have to learn it at a certain period or we can’t. Language is strange.

DN: In that same speech you talk about your mutual love of science and poetry, how science explicates and poetry implicates. Can you talk more about this, and about your desire to subjectify the universe? I know normally, when people think of subjectification, they think of something interior, maybe even self-referential, but here you’re seeing it as a path toward reaching out.

UKL: There was an article by Frans de Waal in the New York Times about tickling bonobo apes and getting the complete, as it were, human response, of giggling, of drawing away but wanting more, and so on. A marvelous, subtle article. Many scientists want to objectify our relationship with animals and so we cannot say that the little ape is acting just the way a little human would. No, it’s responding only in ape fashion. We mustn’t use human words, we mustn’t anthropomorphize. And as de Waal points out, there’s this kind of terror of fellowship. We can’t, we’re not to, have fellow feeling with an ape or a mouse. But where’s poetry without fellow feeling?

FROM THE FOREWORD TO

Late in the Day

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Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for.” A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless “information” that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

DN: You have a poem, “Contemplation at McCoy Creek,” that deals with this issue of subjectifying the universe, of reaching outward, really well.

UKL: It’s a kind of philosophical poem, and I will say a word about it. I was out in Harney County without a library, wondering what the word contemplation means. It seems to have the word temple in it, and the prefix con means “together,” you know. So that is where I started, and then—this will explain the middle of the poem—there was a book in the ranch house, a kind of encyclopedia-dictionary, and it had a very good essay on the word contemplation. So it was sort of a learning experience, this poem.

DN: There is a line at the beginning of that poem—“seeking the sense within the word”—that reminded me of something you said in an interview with Poetry Society of America. They had a column called “First Loves,” where they asked poets to talk about their first exposure to poetry. You talked about a collection of narrative poems, Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Babington Macaulay, and also about the poems of Swinburne, how you learned through those poems that you could tell stories through poems, but also that the stories are often beyond the meaning of the words themselves, that there is a deeper meaning of story that comes from the beat and the music of the words, not from the meaning of the individual words. Can you talk about that a little bit?

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Contemplation at McCoy Creek

Seeking the sense within the word, I guessed: To be there in the sacred place, the temple. To witness fully, and be thus the altar of the thing witnessed.

In shade beside the creek I contemplate how the great waters coming from the heights early this summer changed the watercourse. The four big midstream boulders stayed in place. The willows are some thriving and some dead, rooted in, uprooted by the flood. Over the valley in the radiant light a raven takes its way from east to west; shadow wings across the rimrock pass as silent as the raven. Contemplation shows me nothing discontinuous. When I looked in the book I found: Time is the temple—Time itself and Space— observed, marked out, to make the sacred place on the four-quartered sky, the inwalled ground.

To join in continuity, the mind follows the water, shadows the birds, observes the unmoved rock, the subtle flight. Slowly, in silence, without words, the altar of the place and hour is raised. Self is lost, a sacrifice to praise, and praise itself sinks into quietness.

~ 8 ~