I have to confess up front that I’m not a bird person. Many of my poet-friends are bird people: bird-watchers, connoisseurs of birds. For years now my vision has been deteriorating, and about the best I can do, on the fly as it were, is distinguish “bird” from some other airborne form. But my musical training remains intact, and a meadowlark still sounds like a meadowlark.
In the fall of 2020 I was on sabbatical and had a fellowship scheduled at Durham University in the U.K. This was one of many, many things that never happened, due to the pandemic. Without it, I decided to spend some writing time in the Midwest. I thought, at the time, that the manuscript I was working on dealt primarily with public access to land—much of the writing I’d been doing was in state or national parks, and I thought of what would become The Opening Ritual as my “national park book.” It wasn’t, as it turned out, but it was on that impulse that I found myself in Arrow Rock.
Arrow Rock is an all-but-ghost town on the Missouri River, established in 1829 on the Santa Fe Trail. Since 1926 it has been a state historic landmark and since 1963 a national historic landmark. I’d studied Arrow Rock’s history almost thirty years before, when I was a graduate student in U.S. history and was thinking about writing a book about ghost towns in the American popular imagination. But I’d never actually been there, and unlike Durham University, it was open. One of the surviving early 19th-century houses was available to rent.
I spent eight days there, walking what’s left of the town and its environs and thinking about Arrow Rock’s history at the intersection of settler colonialism, the ecological changes that accompanied settler agriculture, slavery (because this part of Missouri was occupied and dominated by Southern plantation owners), the fragility of human institutions (churches, schools, benevolent societies), hydrology (the river long ago rerouted itself away from the townsite), and the history of American painting (Arrow Rock having been the home of the renowned 19th-century painter George Caleb Bingham). It was mid-September, and the bits of restored or residual prairie south and west of the townsite were brilliant displays of color. It was south of town that I heard what I was sure was a meadowlark, perhaps many meadowlarks, a field-full of meadowlarks. Or maybe just one, well-hidden. (I never actually saw any meadowlarks in Arrow Rock—I only heard them.)
The poem began as a series of feints at description—nine in fact. I describe the meadowlark in the third person as an “it,” although other pronouns actual or implied slip in: the “you” of the call it doesn’t make (“Do you believe, do you believe”) and the implied “you” of the imperative voice (“Come away”) before the “you” outright, in the apostrophe to the “warden.” And there is that “I,” the Romantic (or in this case perhaps Emersonian) “I,” that happens to be me.
When I was done, I wasn’t done. There was something else. I scrawled “Draft 1” at the top of my page and then tried a second page, headed “Draft 2.” “Draft 2” in the final poem feels like a trace, a vestige of something longer, but—it wasn’t. “Draft 2” was always this and only this. It was a direct turn to the meadowlark as a “you,” a conjured “you.” And it is a proposal.
I assign Shelley’s “To a Sky-Lark” in my annual ecopoetics class, but it’s not really a poem I admire: the intention, the sheer willfulness of the poet’s address to the bird. Shelley hails the skylark—boldly—but what he wants is for it to teach him, specifically the artfulness in the artlessness of its song, its very way of being: “Teach me half the gladness / That thy brain must know” (as a result of which Shelley will get enhanced poetic output and become the heroic, world-honored poet he so longs to be). We could shorten that sentence simply to “Shelley wants,” and that is perhaps the problem at the heart of the Romantic project: the use of nature as a mirror, as a reflection and ultimately a projection or tool of human desire. Can anyone see without wanting? Where is the will? These are foundational questions to any ecopoetics, that posits an ecological relationship in and through the creation of a work of art (as inescapably an act of human will).
For me as a poet there’s a joy in sheer description, as there is also an excitement in the act of address. To describe, meaning to transpose experience (sensual or otherwise) into the register of language—communicable language. Description is always an act of translation. And in so doing propose, to some notional reader, that something could be shared. To address, meaning to conjure that notional reader (or auditor) explicitly, via deixis: you. You there. Not you, but you. You, defined as whatever or whomever the poem is addressing. Sometimes I think “you” is the most complicated word in the English language. “You” is always a revelation to me.
I didn’t want anything from the meadowlark, except the privilege of describing it, and then—unexpectedly—to propose something to it. I wasn’t expecting that final couplet at all. Dusk had fallen; the meadowlark or meadowlarks had gone silent. There was no sense (literally no sense, in any human sense) in speaking back to it, and the time for singing back to it had passed. I’m not even sure I know what the couplet means (although I do think the prairie night might be worth memorizing, by someone or something, not necessarily me). In retrospect what I can say is that the proposal is an attempted mutualism, an effort to conceive of a non-hierarchical mutualism, a sustaining and participatory mutualism. However fragile, however fleeting or flawed.
As for The Opening Ritual, although it has many state and national park poems in it (including other Arrow Rock poems), it became, in the end, a meditation on mercy, on the possibility of mercy (at the far edge of chronic illness, but that’s another story). We could do worse than be co-participants in some economy or ecology of mercy: which is almost impossible to address or describe, because it describes us, it addresses us. It’s an act of generosity we participate inside.
