Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

THINGS WHOLE AND HOLY FOR KENNETH REXROTH 213

From his 1940 vantage point Rexroth adds, “Thirty factories empty their refuse
into the creek. / The farm has given way to an impoverished suburb.”
With his first wife he moved to California in 1927, and for more than fifty
years worked at galvanizing American culture. What Li Po gave Ezra Pound
during World War I, Tu Fu gave Rexroth: a spur for renewing consciousness
with precise images from the surrounding world, pared-down verse, straight
syntax, startling turns of mind. “Toward an Organic Philosophy” tries it all out
on his favorite terrain, the Sierra Nevada.

All day cloud shadows have moved over the face of the mountain,

The shadow of a golden eagle weaving between them

Over the face of the glacier.

Nearer his campsite, things pass from visual to visionary.

The wiry clumps of dwarfed whitebark pines

Are smoky and indistinct in the moonlight,

Only their shadows are really visible.

The lake is immobile and holds the stars

And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver.

Immobile lake, peaks sunk in water: despite the shadows, moonlight makes a reflec-
tion Ansel Adams would have waited days for. Then wildness passes even nearer.

All night the eyes of deer shine for an instant

As they cross the radius of my firelight.

On their own, the deer in this “organic philosophy” shine for only an instant
within the human circle.
Camping meant rapture for Rexroth and his wife Andrée. Her death in 1940
sparked a lament echoing Milton’s Lycidas—“Yet once more, O ye Laurels.. .”
—on their cherished ground at Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco.

Now once more gray mottled buckeye branches

Explode their emerald stars,

And alders smoulder in a rosy smoke

Of innumerable buds.

I know that spring again is splendid

As ever, the hidden thrush

As sweetly tongued, the sun as vital—

But these are the forest trails we walked together,

These paths, ten years together.

We thought the years would last forever,

They are all gone now, the days

We thought would not come for us are here.

Bright trout poised in the current—

The raccoon’s track at the water’s edge—