224 PA RT T W O
if we ’re to come through sanely. Just that rain-glazed wheelbarrow has a cleans-
ing effect, what ’s mundane glistens a little.
“We awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things.” Oppen prized this
notion, from the philosopher Jacques Maritain. Though no human self, no “I”
enters the scene, his title poem from a 1965 collection catches such an awaken-
ing. This wild scene ’s biblical title and Latin epigraph dawn on us line by line.
Psalm
Veritas sequitur ...
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.A kind of psalm, but no figures of speech as in the Hebrew Psalms: “Like as the
hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God.” Nor any
praise of divine providence: “Thou makest the darkness that it may be night,
wherein all the beasts of the forest do move.” Yet Oppen will earn his title.
Veritas sequitur ... Knowing “verity” in English and “non sequitur,” we
grasp his epigraph: “Truth follows.. .” But truth follows what? Or follows
from what? What sort of truth, and why those dots holding suspense? Few of
us will recognize Saint Thomas Aquinas: Veritas sequitur esse rerum, “Truth
follows the being of things.” Maybe this jibes with Williams, “No ideas but
in things”? Whatever we make of its openness, the epigraph comes alive in
Oppen’s lines.
Along with gratitude for Creation, the Psalms cry out in estrangement. Op-
pen passes somewhere between those two voices. First comes a quiet awe at “the