214 PA RT T W O
A bittern booming in the distance—
Your ashes scattered on this mountain—
Moving seaward on this stream.Sorrow brightens with the music given to nature, “alders smoulder in a rosy
smoke,” and there ’s more: “Bright trout poised in the current.” Spring again is
splendid but those years are gone, so these trout, poised and shining, hold still
against the current carrying her ashes downstream. For Tu Fu, Rexroth once
said, “Values are the way we see things”—the emphasis falling on see.
Several years later he wrote a longer elegy, starting at Tamalpais where life
still thrives around her ashes: waterfalls, birds, “Ripe toyon and madrone ber-
ries.” Deer and raccoon abound, “A bittern / Calls from the same rushes.” Then
moving to Kings River Canyon in the Sierra, we find the trout have migrated.
It ’s autumn, the couple lie among “turning and falling leaves,” with
Bats from the caves, dipping
Over the odorous pools
Where the great trout drowsed in the evenings.Maybe that ’s the most we get, balancing what ’s human with what is not, youth
and loss held like Keats’s gathering swallows in this autumn “Where the great
trout drowsed.” Rexroth nursed a “Chinese sense of the unbreakable whole-
ness of reality.”
Nature and Love have run together for millennia. The beloved is like a young
hart in the Song of Songs, “Western Wind” and “small rain” bring my love in
“my arms again,” Shakespeare ’s Juliet is the sun, and so on. For Rexroth, Eros
flourishes outdoors, bound up with the “holiness of the real”: the lake immobile
with stars and peaks, the bright trout poised. And sometimes passion in the grass
leaves no time for holiness.
The sweet virile hair of thunderstorms
Brushes over the swelling horizon.
Take off your shoes and stockings.
I will kiss your sweet legs and feet
As they lie half buried in the tangle
Of rank scented midsummer flowers.
Take off your clothes. I will press
Your summer honeyed flesh into the hot
Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage
Of midsummer.It bothers a bit to see “woman” bound to Nature, molded by man. Though
Rexroth finds “summer in our twined bodies” and celebrates Sappho, the ancient
Greek lesbian poet, he sounds more like Pablo Neruda than Sappho, pressing
summer flesh into hot soil.