RICHARD TAYLOR
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Field Sparrows
Rising and lighting,
then rising again.
From snowpatch to snowpatch
probing the thickets for seeds.
Now a dozen scored in fence-grids
outside my window.
Wing wed to wing,
they dart to some cue
quilled deep in the feather.
As if each
preserved in its beak
a corner of some inevitable quilt--
the stitching, a saga of sparrows
or a history of hawks.
[33]
Letter to David Orr
-- Cloverport, Kentucky
Thank you for showing me
the cane today,
the tall patch near Goose Creek
a parking lot will cover soon.
Hunkered in this shade-mesh,
space closed by stalks
ten feet and higher,
chill wind shushing through
a thousand spear-shaped leaves,
it all comes back.
Tales where Boone laid up
outfoxing Indians,
Cherokees who twined the fibers
to hold shelled corn.
Stands that fattened buffalo
and kept the Bluegrass
spare of trees.
These jaunts we take
to scraps of virgin timber,
to beds of fossil coral
at the Falls,
picking blueberries
one handful frail as air
on Big Black Mountain--
this lust to get
the primal girth of things,
it strikes me finally why:
to reconstruct an unconstructed
state,
the touchy balance of a dozen
hardwoods we might measure by
before we dwindled,
so that as we fall
our hands might judge the rings.
[34]
Bluegrass Parkway
Above the vetch
which holds the slanting gravels
to their banks,
the cuts
where seas are sliced
from fossil rock,
are stands of scrub
the highway people plant
to keep the status quo,
the touchy boulders
napping on their slopes,
the rains from gouging
canyons in the clay.
Along this bluff
where hardpan ripens into woods
are flowering dogwoods,
dwarfed natives
which the blue pines veto,
their upturned leaf-ends
tipped toward sun,
the gagged white blossoms
wangling bits of sky.
Sparse this spring
the dogwoods plead for light.
The limbs twist up
in spits of crumpled speech,
each purple twig,
each scrolled white petal
eloquently refuting the evergreens.
[35]
Along the Bluegrass Parkway
in Early Spring
Lulled as the hills slide by,
my eye follows the stripe
of torch-shaped cedars
that jag along the embankment
mile after mile after mile.
Each forms a shaggy cone
with bristles that rise
dark as the undersides
of waves, tactile as fur.
Then, prying between the bushy
crowns, redbuds spray into view.
Against the dingy conifers,
the pallid slopes, they detonate
in geysers of light, petals liquid
and pink as a calf's tongue.
Long after the landscape flattens,
they hover in the mind:
pink fretwork lit in bright
swatches, pushy branchlets
reared by fluxions of light
and native inclination.
[36]
A Prescription for Coping with the
Next Millennium
in One Sentence or Less
With no known remedy
for the millennial jitters
in all its predications
of planetary doom--
cyber glitches, jinxed aircraft,
unchartable tides of giddy
rapture, and global warming
that simmers to a cosmic boil--
I improvise as I go, having
tailored no special strategy
to survive digital disruption,
seismic rumblings, or sudden
shifts of psychic ballast
other than to tighten the laces
on my sneakers and take careful
sightings from one landmark
to the next--a pond, a melon patch,
or just another feathery ridge--
inching toward
the Great Millennial Divide
at a pace one savvy neighbor,
a genius at disencrypting
contradictory signs, describes
as a 'passionate mosey.'
[37]
Severn Creek
--
for Gray Zeitz
of Larkspur
For the third spring we trek
the disused county road,
deer prints pressing ground
made soft by yesterday's showers.
In gray tiers, hardwoods rise up
toward the cedared bluffs.
The luscious glut of creekwater
riffles through us intimate as breath.
It's early. Spring spurs its lime
among the branchtips--not yet
an exclamation. The trout lily
has performed its bloom,
but the Dutchman's-breeches
are still furled like silken flags.
Fire pinks still smolder
hours shy of floral combustion,
the beds of bluebells
we hiked miles to see
already basking in the bottoms.
As we pass a bank of larkspurs,
each spiked floret asserting
its purple integrity, its tensile grace,
Gray, inspired, declares this occasion
the annual meeting of his board.
With a simple show of hands
the membership, each sprig, each
spacious leaf, reaffirms its policy
to vegetate the hills,
following by-laws to the letter
with each corporate tendril,
each dash of color, as we all assent
to raise, to resurrect, the dead.
[38]
Living Where the Water
Doesn't Come
The rest of the county
ties on to city water,
and the tank-truck haulers
call it quits, careering down
the drive in boas of ocherous dust.
We become scholars of dearth,
rain scouts, frugal bathers.
Out of the subdivision loop--
beyond that oasis of twirling
sprinklers and manic ablutions--
we adapt to cycles of vapor
and downpour that waver unreliably
between too little and too much.
Dearth we come to know
as just another station on the map
of human longing, somewhere
south of envy, north of grief.
Dry and getting dryer, we dream
the hydrophiliac's dream:
of copia, fullness, a watery hoard
of liquid plenty that gushes
through the downspouts,
tops the cistern, and peters out
just jiggers short of flood.
[39]
The Abolitionist Cassius Clay
Steps Briefly out of His Memoirs
During a Severe Drought
Under this cobalt sky
that holds not one rumor,
one smudge of moisture,
the 'Lion of White Hall' revives.
Not the duelist, soldier, diplomat,
but his wavery shadow,
an old man in his eighties armed
with only a small brass cannon
against the twin demons
of loneliness and despair.
Twice divorced, shunned
by his surviving children,
sequestered in an empty house--
a thirty-room fortress in which
he nurses his parched spirit.
He makes the best of exile,
his beard and uncut hair graying
'with the frost which never melts.'
During the day he keeps society
with flowers and shrubs.
He gathers about him 'dogs
and pigeons and barnfowls'--
even the 'mute fishes.'
A bird cage hangs from the sweetgum
under which he reads Plutarch
or Stowe, a crumb-box
nailed to the window ledge.
Each night he swings open
his bedroom shutters
to draw in the bats, consoled,
exhilarated, as they flit about
snatching flies from the wall plaster.
His greatest pleasure, their fluttering
wingbeats, 'life, life!'
[40]
Closing out the Millennium
with a Bonfire in Elkhorn Bottom
Against these wooded hills, this pod of dark,
against the cold that weasels through
out bootsoles, we stack drift and rotting
fenceposts. As the first flames flicker,
catch, then climb the trussworks limb
by limb, the old conversion works its spell--
from substance into dissipating fumes.
Bakes in front, freezing back, we huddle
toward the candescent core where embers
breathe their own small breaths. The numb
blood passing through us joins the circuitry
of deadfalls, glowing ash, this womb of heat
& light we've piled against the century's dark.
Near as we dare, we inch closer to the coals.
[41]
Richard Taylor is Professor of English at Kentucky State University.
He received his B.A. degree from the University of Kentucky, his M.A. and
J.D. degrees from the University of Louisville, and his Ph.D. from the
University of Kentucky. Taylor practiced law for a short period and then
became an English professor. He was Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of
Kentucky from 1999-2001.
Taylor received the Distinguished Professor Award at Kentucky State
University in 1992 and has won two creative writing fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts. He is a speaker for the Kentucky Humanities
Council Speakers Bureau and an antiquarian book dealer. Taylor lives near
Frankfort, where he owns and operates Poor Richard's Books.
"Field Sparrows," "Letter to David Orr," and "Bluegrass Parkway" appear
in Taylor's Earth Bones (Gnonom Press, 1979). |
