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

STANLEY KUNITZ—HIS NETTLED FIELD, HIS DUNE GARDEN 205

in the trunks of the maples

and a stringy old lilac

more than two stories tall

blazing with mildew

remembered a door in the

long teeth of the woods.

The indents move memory step by step, but it ’s no jaunt, what with “riddled,”
“sank,” “stringy,” that visionary “blazing” again, and a magical door in the
woods’ “long teeth.” Along this trail, “flickering presences” meet a child fol-
lowing “in the steps / of straight-backed Massasoit / soundlessly heel-and-
toe / practicing my Indian walk.”
His quest, like Frost ’s “Directive” moving through woods back to a child-
hood source, takes a fatherless boy “Past the abandoned quarry” and

on to the clearing

with the stones in my pocket

changing to oracles...

There I stood in the shadow,

at fifty measured paces,

of the inexhaustible oak...

that locked King Philip’s War

in its annulated core

under the cut of my name.

Much is happening here. Massasoit, a Wampanoag sachem, befriended the Pil-
grims, but the native inhabitants were soon threatened. In 1675 his son “King
Philip” led a revolt against the colonists—with devastating losses. Of course
the Jewish child of immigrants wouldn’t have known that an oak he carved
his name in had rings stemming from this core history. As a boy in 1918, “My
life hinged on the three throws permitted me... If I hit the target-oak once,
somebody would love me; if I hit it twice, I should be a poet; if I scored all three
times, I should never die.”
Along with tribal tragedy, a ritual of sacred groves and trees touches the loyal
son, then (and now) calling

Father wherever you are

I have only three throws

bless my good right arm.

Now the poet finds no trail but a highway, and tanks maneuvering where Model
A Fords once sputtered. It ’s “a murderous time,” with Vietnam in mind and
Martin Luther King’s assassination. An ache ends this journey.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark