Stations of the Court, part 3: Another Blessing
There is a poem by James Wright that I greatly admire. In my college years I tried several times to write one like it, but could never do so::
A Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
I saw it in an anthology long before it was assigned to me in class. I appreciated Wright’s ability to convey elevated imagery in plain language, and his courage in expressing simple heartfelt sentiment, a big no-no in the sterile world of post-war American verse.
The poem is based on an actual experience, which probably occurred in the late 1950s. The friend is the poet Robert Bly. Bly wrote
James saw two ponies off to the left and said, "Let’s stop." So we did, and climbed over the fence toward them. We stayed only a few minutes, but they glowed in the dusk, and we could see it. On the way to Minneapolis James wrote [the poem] in his small spiral notebook.”
Bly says the poem is about the fear of death, and serves as a critique of “the Pauline and Augustinian view that the body is corrupt, sinful and utterly impure.” Like much mid-century criticism, this seems to add a lot that isn’t there. I see 21 lines expressing a few minutes of wonder in a pasture, and three expressing a moment of transcendence. But there’s no argumentation, and no imagery one would associate with death, unless you count all the femininity (come to think of it maybe Bly did).
The poem is so perfect in its structure and effect that it was only natural that Wright would try the rain dance again, and he did. But this time it was not the heavens that opened, but maybe the gates of Hell:
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
As in “A Blessing” the last line expresses a sudden, movement from the direct experience of the world to a personal statement. The line “I have wasted my life” - so jarring on first reading - has been the subject of much debate. In 2015 Dan Piepenbring wrote an essay in The Paris Review (linked below) bringing together many different interpretations. David Mitchell and Robert Bly insist the line is a kind of affirmation, while others take a more literalist view. Still others appreciate its ambiguity, and see the art in the questions the line forces us to ask of the poem, and ourselves.
I don’t know how one would know, but - what if “I have wasted my life” is just a passing thought, a cloud that wafts across his mind’s eye in the same way as the chicken hawk? In “A Blessing” Wright says “suddenly I realize”, but here the turn is a simple flat statement. What if it is not a statement of belief or insight, but just an honest report of a moment in time?
I spoke with Eamonn Grennan once about Robert Lowell’s line, “my mind’s not right.” I first read it as a kind of a Frankensteinian pronouncement: MY MIND’S NOT RIGHT, basically a double spondee. But Grennan raised the possibility that it might be milder, perhaps just a moment of observation. He tilted his head and repeated the line in his gentle Irish accent - “me mind’s not right”, with a rising tone on “mind”. The effect was one of slightl surprise: oh, this splinter, where did that come from?
Wright never declaims, so we can rule that out. It could be that “I have wasted my life” comes as much as a surprise to the narrator as it does to us. Late in his life, Wright told an interviewer that
I’m not straining myself and yet I’m happy at this moment, and perhaps I’ve been wastefully unhappy in the past because through my arrogance or whatever, and in my blindness, I haven’t allowed myself to pay true attention to what was around me.
My basketball ritual has influenced my thinking on matters like these. Shooting a basketball is a complicated activity, and I learned early in the process that the more I thought about my shot, the worse it got. My eyes can see the hoop, my hands can shoot the ball - they know what to do, let them work. Kevin Durant, when asked what he thought about when shooting, said “I try not to,” or words to that effect.
The ritual has a calming effect; perhaps all rituals do. It is repetitive, it invites focus, it gently reprehends distraction. I cannot claim any special expertise, but the Zen idea of “polishing the mirror” - clearing the junk behind the eyes - is as good a description of my experience as any. The Zen prescription is not to analyze or litigate passing thoughts, but to simply notice them and return focus to the present moment.
The ritual has mostly been a solitary experience for me, which can be put down to the twin effects of introversion and Covid. But not always: I was working through my program a few days ago, perhaps a half hour before the sun went down. There was a lively game of three-on-three on the other court. A young man approached and asked if he could share the basket. We practiced together for a while, working silently through our routines, attending just slightly to one another, occasionally rebounding one another’s misses. We asked nothing of one another, just focusing on the task at hand. I nodded to him as I left, he to me.
The next day I started to speak of this to a friend but stopped, my throat closed, my eyes blocked with tears.