352 PART THREE
& lightning for knees and elbows
your eyes full of pollen
the smell of bats.
the flavor of sandstone
grit on the tongue.
women
birthing
at the foot of ladders in the dark.
trickling streams in hidden canyons
under the cold rolling desert
corn-basket wide-eyed
red baby
rock lip home,
AnasaziThe way of the words makes an ongoing whole of Anasazi dwellings cornfields
religion animals mothers children and watershed desert homeland. Meanwhile
“growing... sinking... birthing... trickling” hold a people in their own
present, or maybe caught back then—which poses a challenge, if we want their
ways open to us now.
It ’s still not quite known why the Anasazi vanished after flourishing for cen-
turies—drought, erosion, deforestation, religious or political hostility. Today
we see a far-removed people, each in their “energy-pathways that sustain life,”
Snyder tells us. “Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and
then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.”
Being together. On a 1950 visit to Reed College, William Carlos Williams
treated three young poets as writers, not hicks. Snyder recalls one thing the
elder man said, “Art is about conviviality”—“And that stuck in my mind!”
Living together joyously. We can hear and see as much when Snyder performs
his poems, moving from a deep voice to a tenor, varying speed, volume, tone,
intensity, emphasis, with sudden enunciations, hands gesturing, fingers pointing,
often with a comical shrug, facial turns and shakes and glances. Poetry jogs us
together with other peoples, with our own and other species.
During the Sixties a fresh urgency moved him, just before Rachel Carson’s
wake-up call Silent Spring: “As poet I hold the most archaic values on earth.
They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals
... the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in
mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against
the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”
Moving his family in 1970 to a hundred acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills,