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

NEWS OF THE NORTH FROM JOHN HAINES 287

come out to eat the food. At sunrise the diviner will return, and by noting

where the tracks of the jackal enter, cross, or seem to communicate between

the signs, he will read and interpret their meaning.

Any poet needs this “creative flow between the inner and the outer worlds.”
To absorb the “elements of rock and water, of night and dawn” where Robin-
son Jeffers lived, Haines at one point moved to a redwood barn near the Carmel
River in California. The older poet ’s presence spurred him “like a spring in the
desert.” Even if Jeffers’s soaring hawks, if “the very rocks of the shoreline dis-
appear and the cypresses are displaced by the restless engineers of our world,”
his words and verse like “the beat of the ocean... will survive.”
When times turned drastic, during the Vietnam years, Haines like Denise
Levertov and Galway Kinnell did not offer self-righteous polemic. He trusts his
own psyche and environs to gauge war’s impact. “Smoke” makes no pretense of
depicting but instead dreams home the overseas disaster as a wild presence.

An animal smelling

of ashes

crossed the hills

that morning....

All day that animal

came and went,

sniffing at trees

still vaguely green,

its fur catching

in the underbrush.

At sundown, it settled

upon the house,

its breath

thick and choking.

The war in Southeast Asia “mingles with smoke / from moss fires / in the home-
steader’s clearing.” In dire times we can only, and we must, connect outer to
inner world.
Because Alaska taught him a wholeness of earth and spirit he saw lacking in
twentieth-century America, California’s Indian past grips Haines.

A girl, half Indian, seated

on a floor of beaten clay,

threading beads,

little knots of green fire

on a strand of sinew.

Though “the wilderness vanished,” he says, “Wilderness survives at the
camp / we have made within us”—a striking thought. Yet “the green circle