Letter to Harrison

Jim,

Though you’re not already dead, you look it more and more every time you grimace for a New York Times reporter or take a pass on the wine and cheese then take some after all. I wanted to ask you about Nature, but you were busy burning your tongue on a microwaved hot dog. I wanted to ask you about immortality but wound up bumming a cigarette. I wanted to ask you about women, but you turned to watch a girl ride by on a bicycle. I wanted to ask you about death, but my voice was lost in the March wind where you were walking to disguise your tears. I wanted to ask you about love, but you were waist deep in a river and trying to keep your balance. I wanted to ask you about fame, but you were out by the corral petting a puppy. I wanted to ask you about art, but you had fallen asleep.

Though you’re not already dead, your sockets are emptying one by one so that even the actresses feel compelled to use a felt tip when addressing their love letters to you. Are you still camped out under the roots of that old growth stump, or did the bear finally get its way? Are you still teaching Nicholson how to act, or will he have to draw the chalk outlines around his own victims? Do you still fire warning shots at sand hill cranes headed toward Los Angeles, or are you saving your shells for the Last Best Meal?

I hope the weather in Michigan turns to the weather in Montana, and the weather in Montana turns to the weather in Arizona as the season allows. Don’t die without writing.

Yours,
Greg

Neo-Post-Naturalists

In Gary Snyder’s book, Danger on the Peaks, the deconstruction of Nature with a capitol N may be nigh complete. Airports, McDonald’s, Denny’s and Motel 6 are not separate from the birds and bees. They may be an ironic inclusion, but they are included, not in something called Nature but in the poet’s total experience. This isn’t new to Snyder who, after all, did engaging bio-regional portraits of New York and Los Angeles. Neither was it new to William Stafford who called himself, his car, a dead doe and an unborn fawn “our group.” Post-Humanist, Post-Colonialist, Post-Structuralist—things get Poster every day out here in the hyperspace of no-nature, or is it now Post-hyperspace?

When we dispense with the Confessional’s guilt, suddenly the barriers start to fall. Robert Lowell’s skunk loses its ironic simplicity. Lowell’s in hell; the skunk’s eating sour cream. And? Sylvia Plath’s daddy’s big toe looks like a seal. And? I’m afraid those tired old Wordsworthians can kiss the still sad music of humanity goodbye—just ask the grizzly trying to rub her radio collar off on a tree.

BUT there’s always Mary Oliver. She still manages to trudge “away from it all” and send the doe into a state of shock when she smells her faun where Mary’s been petting it. And Mary still comes up short in trying to find the right words for greeting a swan. I mean, what if Ronald McDonald were to run out of the woods behind her squeezing an Aflac duck? Would the swan know the difference? Science says the DNA’s pretty much the same.

A human writing a Nature poem is about as credible—and likely, as a WASP extolling the morality of Post-Colonial literature—to get tenure, promotion or a raise. I guess eventually that means we’re all in this together—and what’s wrong with that? It’s only natural.