Landscaping with Wallace Stevens
I spent the weekend landscaping and memorizing bits of Wallace Stevens in between all the mulching, hoeing, and laying down of sedum and rock. I am starting a new project related to Stevens, related to painting; the idea came to me Thursday night after reading his "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock." Though I don't believe in "signs," I'll make an exception and take it as a good one that a poem lamenting white nightgowns and singing the praises of sailors dreaming drunken dreams of "red tigers in red weather" sparked my imagination.
I am taking the project one step and one poem at a time. I'll keep the details to myself for now as I wait to see how it unfolds. I am starting with Steven's "Earthy Anecdote"--that umber-hued, dusty poem of clattering buck hooves through Oklahoma and the disruptive firecat. It's a short poem of only five stanzas. I kept it near me while landscaping throughout the weekend so I could return to it every so often as I committed its rhythms to memory.
The story begins:
"Every time the bucks went clattering/ Over Oklahoma/ A firecat bristled in the way."
If you read the poem and happen to get stuck on the question "What is a firecat?" you risk missing the poem altogether. This is a poem that you must say yes to and be willing to just read on. Because if you look up the term "firecat," you won't find a corresponding creature. In fact, you'll be led back to Stevens and this poem. The firecat is from the place where tigers run in red weather and purple nightgowns have green rings. For me, there is the fire, the bristling, a cat that is, but a cat that isn't. It is the thorny tumbleweed animal-wind force that makes the clattering bucks swerve.
"Wherever they went,/ They went clattering/ Until they swerved/ In a swift, circular line/ To the right,/ Because of the firecat."
Tumbleweed, because it is Oklahoma after all.
The story begins and the firecat is the one who seems to be in control. But as the weekend went on, and I kept re-reading the poem, I realized that the bucks are just as much protagonists as the firecat himself.
In the fourth stanza, after the clattering bucks have swerved to the right then to the left because of the persistent firecat, there is a shift.
"The bucks clattered./ The firecat went leaping./ To the right, to the left,/ And/ Bristled in the way."
The bucks clatter. Then the firecat leaps. The bucks swerve. The firecat bristles again.
And in the end, when the firecat sleeps, even though Stevens doesn't spell it out, you know the bucks too are sleeping. Because every time they clatter, the firecat bristles. And every time bucks clatter, the firecat is in the way. Until they swerve. Or everyone goes to bed.
"Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes/ And slept."
If you are familiar with the yogic concepts of Sthira and Sutkha (steadiness and ease), the poem feels a bit like this to me. In terms of landscaping (or painting if you substitute canvas for land and brush for hoe) it feels like the push and pull, the looping back and forth, of making patterns and designs that are in direct response and dictated by the shape of the terrain and, if you happen to be working on steep-sloped land, the grade of the slope itself. And as more rocks, mulch, and landscaping artifacts are put down, the shape of the terrain is also changed. And that new shape becomes a new question asking for a new response.
And the bucks and the firecat continue clattering and bristling on.
