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in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, com-
mitting suicide just before his birth, haunted him. When he was thirteen, his
mother built a big house “beyond the last trolley-stop,” with “acres of woods
behind us” and a disused quarry, and he spent “long summers” on a farm in
Quinnapoxet. Many decades later, naming a poem for that vanished backwater
village, he dreams of fishing in an “abandoned reservoir” where “snapping
turtles cruised” and a bullhead catfish “gashed my thumb / with a flick of his
razor fin.” Within the dream his parents appear “on the Indian road, / evenly
stepping / past the apple orchard.”
“Why don’t you write?” she cried
from the folds of her veil.
“We never hear from you.”
I had nothing to say to her.
But for him who walked behind her
in his dark worsted suit,
with his face averted
as if to hide a scald,
deep in his other life,
I touched my forehead
with my swollen thumb
and splayed the fingers out—
in deaf-mute country
the sign for father.Folded into this agony is a feel for place: “abandoned” reservoir, tree stumps,
dusty Indian road—signposts to an otherwise mute emotion.
Memory recovers what “set me on the track of poetry.” Kunitz’s signature
poem, “The Testing-Tree,” returns to these woods to find nostalgia blunted
by loss and worse. “I went back to Worcester and looked for the old house at
the city’s edge and those Indian woods. It was a most depressing adventure.
The place had turned into a technological nightmare... an express highway
running through my childhood. On the site of my nettled field stood a housing
development ugly enough for tears.” Yes, though highways and housing have
a use, however unbeautiful.
Why he had to write it, “The Testing-Tree” doesn’t say outright. Its thirty-
seven stanzas begin as classic storytelling: “On my way home from school
.. .” He ’s scuffing in a drainage ditch, “hunting for perfect stones / rolled out
of glacial time / into my pitcher’s hand.” Triplets fetch back to a time when
“dawdling came natural” and he could walk
across a nettled field
riddled with rabbit-life
where the bees sank sugar-wells