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

ZEST OF GALWAY KINNELL 315

In the pushcart market, on Sunday,

A crate of lemons discharges light like a battery.

Icicle-shaped carrots that through black soil

Wove away like flames in the sun,

and so on. Wild nature dwindles here,

The smelts draped on each other, fat with roe,

The marble cod hacked into chunks on the counter,

Butterfishes mouths still open, still trying to eat.

Sewage leaks into the East River with dead fish in a rash of verbal music, call it
“that rank flavor,” half-redeeming the squalor.

Even the gulls pass them up, pale

Bloated socks of riverwater and rotted seed,

That swirl on the tide, punched back

To the Hell Gate narrows, and on the ebb

Steam seaward, seeding the sea.

“I recall getting a little thrill from writing those sounds to match their meaning.”
Kinnell may have lacked that thrill when Vietnam barged in on nature and
our stateside selves, much as for other poets—Stafford, Levertov, Haines, Mer-
win, Hass. “Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond” starts honestly, at home
in Vermont. He ’s watching tadpoles overflown by bombers in the innocence of
“immaculate ozone.” A middle section mimics Whitman’s democratic joy,

And I hear,

coming over the hills, America singing,

her varied carols I hear,

but ousts Walt ’s singing carpenter with “sput of cattleprod” (homeland protests)
and “curses of the soldier” (battlefield anguish). The last section reaches beyond
reach, arcing over to “rice paddies in Asia” where “the flesh that is upthrown
in the air / shall be seized by birds,” and crinkled eyes

gaze up at the drifting sun that gives us our lives,

seed dazzled over the footbattered blaze of the earth.

Speaking his poem at rallies back then, Kinnell kept changing these closing lines,
struggling to imagine and voice war’s impact on our sunbathed planet.
Just that, the struggle to imagine, was crucial during the Vietnam years. And
a good few American combatants, young men shocked into poetry, hardly had
to imagine—they told what they saw. Frank A. Cross, Jr., a California farmer,
found himself spotting (for artillery) a woman in blue with rice-filled baskets
springing from a yoke on her shoulders. Later, “near An Trang August 14,
1969,” he wrote “Gliding Baskets.” “Her face was hidden by her / conical rice