210 PA RT T W O
In his ninety-eighth year, Kunitz was taking on strenuous engagements across
the country, among them a talk on Celan and the Holocaust. At one point he
fell terribly ill. Friends from all over came to his Greenwich Village apartment
to say goodbye—but miraculously he recovered. What mattered then was the
seaside garden. With Genine Lentine he completed a gathering of garden words
and images that came out on his centennial: The Wild Braid.
Years earlier his front yard had been a steep dune with patches of witch
grass: “when I was looking at that sloping sand, I had a vision... a garden that
seems to have taken over a steep hillside, something at rest and in motion at
the same time”—at rest on the slope, in motion inwardly with “plants growing
and blooming and fading and falling away. And there is the natural motion that
comes from the wind itself.” “Mad about gardening,” Kunitz eventually planted
sixty-nine species in tiers from gate to house. “I’m disappearing,” he said once,
walking into the thick of his garden. (plate 14)
The Wild Braidblends gardening with poetry. Both are “a passionate effort
to organize a little corner of the earth, which I want to redeem.” Both har-
bor wildness. Think about stroking the entwined snakes, then about the word
“trembles.”
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.