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

STANLEY KUNITZ—HIS NETTLED FIELD, HIS DUNE GARDEN 209

Raccoons! I can hear them

confabulating on the porch,

half-churring, half-growling,

bubbling to a manic hoot

that curdles the night air.

Something out there appalls.

On the back door screen

a heavy furpiece hangs,

spreadeagled, breathing hard,

hooked by prehensile fingers,

with its pointed snout pressing in,

and the dark agates of its bandit eyes

furiously blazing.

Once again there ’s “blazing,” this time hellish, though language this wild, this
joyous, outdoes what ’s appalling.
He ’s never far from “the creature world” around him. “In my bad times
they’ve sustained me.” A talisman poem, “The Snakes of September,” follows
on Coleridge ’s Ancient Mariner blessing the flashing water snakes, Dickinson
stunned by “a narrow Fellow in the Grass,” and Lawrence awestruck by a sinu-
ous gold snake in his water trough.

All summer I heard them

rustling in the shrubbery,

outracing me from tier

to tier in my garden.

They shelter in Kunitz’s Cape Cod garden, mating

in the dense green brocade

of a north-country spruce,

dangling head-down, entwined

in a brazen love-knot.

I put out my hand and stroke

the fine, dry grit of their skins.

And you know he did that—how else the deftness of “fine, dry grit”?

At my touch the wild

braid of creation

trembles.

In Whitman this might sound arrogant. Here it feels like radical innocence,
thanks to a light touch: pausing “wild” at the break, slant-rhyming “braid,”
marveling as “creation / trembles,” tapering and quieting. “In a poem, what ’s
realhappens!” says poet-survivor Paul Celan.