Reflecting on Postscript by Seamus Heaney and Leaving Tulsa by Jennifer Foerster

Postscript

By Seamus Heaney

“And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flagg Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working of each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly.  You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

I’ve been blessed to see wild swans in County Sligo, Ireland with my four-year old daughter.  She was four at the time. I thought then of Yeats’ wild swans at Coole, of course, but that was before I had read this poem by Heaney.  Certainly Heaney is in every way Yeats’ successor. I think other poets of lesser stature would think twice before mentioning wild swans, just out of deference to the great Yeats?  On that same trip, we also saw wild river salmon, jumping upstream. You have to be patient, of course, but my four-year-old was, and these are the moments that can, as the poet says, blow your heart wide open.

Speaking of, the poet implicitly acknowledges that these heart-blowing moments can include the opening of the heart, like a beautiful fresh morning, but also, heart-breaking moments when you look at a place you once knew, but it has changed.  I recall an essay I read once by Czeslaw Milosz. I have forgotten the name. But I can’t forget this haunting phrase: there used to be an orchard there.  Native American poet Jennifer Foerster captures this type loss in Leaving Tulsa.  So moments, then, can be either heart-expanding, or heart-tearing.  More on that below.

“Useless to think you’ll park and capture it more thoroughly.”  Yes!  If you see it, you see it.  If you don’t, you don’t. These moments cannot be contrived or captured.  Sometimes they can be repeated, at least for a time. I recall a particular bend in westbound highway 84 between Lubbock and my hometown, Farwell, Texas, on the Texas-New Mexico border.  When I drove home from Baylor back in the day, I always recognized this particular spot in the road, and the particular way it underscored the horizon. A real Amarillo by Morning moment.  Before going to college, I didn’t notice the endless horizon much, but then I did.  Years later, as I drove to my hometown for my thirty-year high school reunion, I tried to keep an eye open for the same bend in the highway, but I missed it somehow.  I’m sure it is still there, but I couldn’t summon the experience at will, to Heaney’s point. Back to Ireland: there is a spot after the guards’ gate at Powerscourt Estates, where you drive towards the mansion, and to your left, you can take in the Sugar Loaf.  That view has not yet changed; I anticipate having that heart-opening view for years to come. But now that I think about it: actually, we have parked, and taken photographs, and perhaps we actually did capture the moment more thoroughly? Poetic truths, of course, are not less true if you can find an exception.  Typically the exception illuminates the same or another poetic truth. I think that is how Heaney would respond anyway.

But how can a moment of heartbreak and heart-illumination be one and the same?  Heaney has already given us the answer: “You are neither here nor there”.  Again, only a poet of Heaney’s stature would dare incorporate so succinctly what is truly at the inner core of Eliot:

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

This is only stanza II of Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, and Eliot has already answered what he set forth in The Waste Land:

“Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses.”

What once tormented Eliot, that is, one’s inability to define, to capture, to harness; to understand, to find purpose, to find what one is looking for, is now the reality the reveals to him the greater truth that while the ambiguity of the moment is real, these moments are part of an eternity which is more real and far greater than we can comprehend and capture now.  Life continues to be doled out to us in a mixture of pain and joy. You don’t get the rose without the fire. But if we see it rightly, we can know, all things shall be well.

And as I type that in prose in a weak attempt at poetic criticism, it sounds glib and sort of lame.  But when Heaney writes, in his poem, You are neither here nor there, it is perfect.  And that is why he is the revered Seamus Heaney.  Who else invokes Yeats and Eliot in a short poem, and does so because he can, not because he needs to?

With that, here is Jennifer Foerster’s wonderful but pretty severe lament, Leaving Tulsa.  This is sort of her Waste Land.  Perhaps elsewhere she blesses us with her Four Quartets.  I am only now discovering her poetry.

Leaving Tulsa

By Jennifer Foerster

“Once there were coyotes, cardinals
in the cedar. You could cure amnesia
with the trees of our back-forty. Once
I drowned in a monsoon of frogs—
Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise
for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes.
Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing,
never spoke about her childhood
or the faces in gingerbread tins
stacked in the closet.

She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way.
But I don’t know this kind of burial:
vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves,
peach trees choked by palms.
New neighbors tossing clipped grass
over our fence line, griping to the city
of our overgrown fields.

Grandma fell in love with a truck driver,
grew watermelons by the pond
on our Indian allotment,
took us fishing for dragonflies.
When the bulldozers came
with their documents from the city
and a truckload of pipelines,
her shotgun was already loaded.

Under the bent chestnut, the well
where Cosetta’s husband
hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots
her bundle of beads. They tell
the story of our family. Cosetta’s land
flattened to a parking lot.

Grandma potted a cedar sapling
I could take on the road for luck.
She used the bark for heart lesions
doctors couldn’t explain.
To her they were maps, traces of home,
the Milky Way, where she’s going, she said.

After the funeral
I stowed her jewelry in the ground,
promised to return when the rivers rose.

On the grassy plain behind the house
one buffalo remains.

Along the highway’s gravel pits
sunflowers stand in dense rows.
Telephone poles crook into the layered sky.
A crow’s beak broken by a windmill’s blade.
It is then I understand my grandmother:
When they see open land
they only know to take it.

I understand how to walk among hay bales
looking for turtle shells.
How to sing over the groan of the county road
widening to four lanes.
I understand how to keep from looking up:
small planes trail overhead
as I kneel in the Johnson grass
combing away footprints.

Up here, parallel to the median
with a vista of mesas’ weavings,
the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork,
I see our hundred and sixty acres
stamped on God’s forsaken country,
a roof blown off a shed,
beams bent like matchsticks,
a drove of white cows
making their home
in a derailed train car.”