356 JUST IMAGINE
the Anacostia River, where sewage from the houses of Congress flows through
Washington’s black neighborhoods.
Just imagine
Waking up one day,
Looking out your window starting to say...
No dead birds because of
No dead trees because of
No dead people because ofEl’Jay hits on poetry’s primal impulse: “Just imagine.” So did William Carlos
Williams: “imagine the New World that rises to our windows” every day.
Of course environmental sanity requires more than imagination. It needs
fieldwork, science, journalism, activism, and policy to make life livable for us
all. “Looking out your window,” though, reacting to a poem’s pulse and im-
ages, may strike deeper than policy pronouncements. No wonder Joe Knight ’s
“Observations from a Penitentiary Window” reaches out to “a bright waterfall
running / down the leaf-green hills,” and “bumblebees / loping above the wild
roses / along the shoreline.”
Few people spend their days among leaf-green hills, but in cities, where
other sorts of news reach us. Urban environment, before it was called that,
abounds in poems like El’Jay Johnson’s: Blake on London’s “blackening street,”
Coleridge pent up “In the great city,” Hopkins deploring Oxford ’s “base and
brackish skirt,” Yeats fleeing “pavements gray,” Eliot in “rats’ alley,” Millay
rhythmically “Sick of the city, wanting the sea,” Neruda’s “streets frightful as
gullies,” Lowell gaping at Boston’s “giant finned cars,” Levertov’s “babel of
destructive construction.”
Just as often, despite any bitterness, poems of urban nature turn up joy-
ous, bolstering sights: Whitman’s “still excitement” leaning over “swift cur-
rent” on the Brooklyn ferry, Williams’s young sycamore thrusting “between
the wet / pavement and the gutter,” Neruda greeting the Inca city of Machu
Picchu—“Mother of stone, spume of condors,” Elizabeth Bishop charmed by
Santarém, an Amazonian town whose “street was deep in dark-gold river sand,”
May Swenson welcoming snow to Manhattan, where
Streets will be fields
cars be fumbling sheep...
By morning we ’ll be children
feeding on manna
a new loaf on every doorsill,Lowell’s “mother skunk” parading Main Street, Shirley Kaufman’s autumn cro-
cus exploding from Jerusalem soil—“Look! They say for a moment,” Kinnell’s