"A Song" - Poem and Explication

A bowl of sycamore wood

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Mouth Work was my third book of poetry. Winner of the Lena Shull Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, it was published by St Andrews University Press in 2016. The book is dedicated to three young men, brothers, that my wife and I befriended when they arrived in North Carolina from the refugee camp in Rwanda where they grew up. Recently we flew to Rwanda to attend the wedding of the youngest brother, a wonderful trip that set me to thinking again about one of my favorite poems in Mouth Work, or anywhere else, titled simply “A Song.” It’s a poem where the young men play a brief but key role.

Famous poets have no need to explicate their own work—others will do it for them—but an audience exists if they care to do so. As to us who are unknown, no one will do it for us: if there is no audience for the poem, there is certainly none for the explication. For the poet to do it is a vain endeavor in both senses of the word vain, and yet for this poem it seems, to me, worthwhile to do, if only to revisit the poem and breathe again its clear air.

It's quite likely that my understanding of the poem is now shaped by my recent reading in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. The world we live in is increasingly virtual, he writes, that is, it is increasingly “mechanistic, fragmented, [and] decontextualized.” It is a “self-reflexive … world,” a “hall of mirrors” with the exits blocked.

A Song

A poem for the sycamore,
a sycamore for the snake
that swims in the shallows
sheltered by its roots, roots
for the land, to hold it in place,

land for the sycamore, on whose
long thick limb we’ve lain
cantilevered over the river
in shade, shade as blue as a jay’s
feathers and free to all comers.
 
* * *
 
A poem for board feet standing
in a mane of leaves fluttered by air
of their own making, air
for poet and spouse,
poet and spouse for each other

and land and snake
and river and sycamore,
sycamore for the leaves,
leaves for the air, air for the song
of marriage we are singing.
 
* * *
 
Those who venture off trail--
booted against snakes,
whistling Colonel Bogey’s March,
surveyor’s maps rolled underarm--
see dimity patterns

the roots make on ground
checkered with shadow and light,
and with every step are wary:
clutters of leaves may strike,
the stepped-on stick bite back.
 
* * *
 
Those tongues flicker
to find us out, warm-blooded
calculators who fell
and bark, slab and mill
through knot and burl

till the tree of knowledge
is pollarded and bare,
a lacquered coat rack
where perch the birds
of abstraction.
 
* * *
 
This sycamore rising dog-legged--
or is it a god’s leg, or that
of a god’s horse straining
the wooden musculature
to rear against the bit?--

is hard to fix in words
that do not hobble the power,
but when saw and dozer
cut their buck and wing,
easy to reckon the board feet.


* * *
 
By this border of blooming
surveyor’s flags in weeks
we’ll step arm in arm
then do-si-do over hardwood;
on a bed as wide as a pond

glimpse in our dreams
afternoons that stretched
a heron’s wing over the river
in woods whose high crowns
for us have been lopped and pulped
 
* * *
 
and made into this paper
on whose void the words
elusive as a swarm of gnats
reeling and spinning
bless our reading chair,

our table where a boy
not long from Africa
types the home row letters:
lads fall; all sad lads;
half sad half glad: all fall;


* * *
 
bless the safe place we have made,
the wooden bowl on the table,
the fruit that fills it, the gnats
eating the ripe fruit, the fruit
of prayer and meditation;

and bless the headboard in whose
shadow we dream the tree
whose fruit we are—logger,
surveyor, poet and spouse,
lads: same tree, same fruit. 
 
I began the poem many years ago, in the first class I took from Ann Garbett’s continuing education poetry class at Duke University. The first finished version was rather moralistic, and as such was strongly criticized by a group member. So it went back into the slush pile, was pulled out from time to time, revised, then thrown back as still unsatisfactory.

At some point I hit on the device of anadiplosis to enact verbally the interchanges and trade-offs in life that constitute the theme of the poem. In anadiplosis, the words at the end of a phrase or clause are repeated at the beginning of the next: “A poem for the sycamore, / a sycamore for the snake.”

“A Song” has 16 five-line stanzas, divided into eight two-stanza sections. Anadiplosis figures most in the first two sections: “sycamore for the leaves / leaves for the air, air for the song / of marriage….” The device is used to emphasize the interplay of energies and gifts: “roots / for the land, to hold it in place, // land for the sycamore.” The roots of the sycamore hold the riverbank in place, and earth is what the sycamore needs to put down roots.

One thematic thread begins in the 1st section, with a water snake swimming in the shallow pool created by the sycamore’s roots; later, snakes are concealed in the woods amid the roots running along the ground, and further hidden by fallen leaves and the checkered light filtered through the foliage. The reader may be reminded of Moses’s staff that turned to a snake in the court of the Pharoah (3rd section). In the next section, the camouflaged snakes size up the booted surveyors wandering with their maps into the snakes’ mysterious, dangerous domain. The abstracting, calculating, geometric science of the surveyors turns the tree of knowledge in Genesis into a “pollarded and bare /… coat rack,” an abstraction of a tree shorn of leaves and unable to generate the air we breathe (4th section).

This theme is repeated in the next section with different imagery—the muscled trunk of the sycamore suggests a god’s or at least a horse’s powerful leg, a presence of the living tree that one can only evoke but not explain; it is far easier to articulate the commodity value of trees considered as board feet. Back in the 2nd section, the mysterious, unifying interchanges among leaves, air, land, snake, and tree evoke the mystery of the married couple singing a song they did not know until that moment.

In the next section, a couple “step arm in arm” past the surveyor’s flags into their home, onto their bed “as wide as a pond.” And what do they dream about? The woods before they were cleared for their homesite.

In the original version, which was far different in many ways, it was at about this point, then almost at the end of the poem, that the member of the critique protested. I believe the gist of his critique is that people must live somewhere; a poem that does not understand that is empty moralizing. I have since tried hard to avoid the simplicities of ideological judgments.

After rumination of several years, and after becoming happily involved with the young men from Africa, I understood that a way of life has costs, but it has also benefits. The trees that are “lopped and pulped” at the end of the 6th section become paper in the next; and on this paper a young man from Africa prints words he has typed on a computer as he masters his keyboarding skills (he was using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing). The lesson begins with the plaintive messages he can find on the home row, the letters ASDF and JKL where the typist’s fingers rest, plus the letters G and H.

The fallen trees give the table the young man works at, the wooden bowl and the apples that fill it, the married couple’s headboard. They dream about the tree of life to which we all belong.

Comments or suggestions? Email me at [email protected]