The Great Outdoors
We tend to romanticize it as “poets” because we romanticize it as “humans.” The animal in us, that primate ancestor, recognizes the natural world as “home.” And if we are lucky, we still harbor the survival instincts necessary to exist comfortably out there, appreciating the dangers as much as the beauty.
The closer we get to living outdoors away from people and around animals, the less we depend on language. We return to our animal nature that calls for complete sensory awareness. Reading, writing and poetry are mostly useless skills in the great outdoors, yet after we return to our vehicles and drive back to our houses, check our messages, our mail, and prepare to go back to work to pay the bills, we hang onto the memory, those feelings of being out there. Some of us are driven to write about it, and most of us enjoy returning there in our imaginations or between the covers of a book, envisioning our next adventure outdoors.
A “late bloomer,” I found myself in a graduate writing class at age 43 excitedly writing poetry. The professor asked us to consider a topic or theme and write a series of poems around that idea as the basis for a small collection. I don’t tend to think or work that way, but it was an assignment, so I gave it a go and decided to consider something I loved, something outdoors: “wolves” came to mind.
After I wrote the following poem and presented it in a workshop, I found out from several of my fellow writers there were certain images that should never be written about because they are so overdone, clichés. Words or topics like: the moon or wolves or home. That advice should have encouraged me to abandon the whole project about wolves, but one of my biggest faults is I hate being told what I can or can’t do. I understood that they were trying to help me, save me from embarrassing myself, and it wasn’t that I thought I was too old to take their advice, I just didn’t agree.
The “moon,” “wolves,” and my incessant preoccupation with “home,” may continue to pop up in my poems whenever they need to be there. So, dear readers, you’ve been warned. I trust that if you cannot abide those old clichés, you’ll just shine on, shine on my Canis-lupus lunar map to your parents’ back door, just ignore the following excursion outdoors, and get outside, or maybe write your own poem. Enjoy!
The Edge of the Forest
I have glimpsed myself bounding
through the woods at night, shadow
in shadow, aware of the watcher
and my pounding heart. A lone
eye flashes first yellow then blue
deep in the dusky lodgepole
thicket; or is it Venus
winking from behind branches
moved by the evening breeze?
Again, I pad the trail, once
worn down to rut, but the path
grows fainter the further I go.
This knowing and unknowing
about direction or shape
is odd as the appetite for flesh;
our molecular make up;
and my yearning to smell, move
on and return. I hear the panting
of patient breath from the Dog
Star in my bones, thirsty
for mineral blood. So I pull
these wolves inside – these agitated
electrons of earth and sky –
but I cannot hold them there.
Circles, motion is what I am
certain of; that nothing stops
at the edge of the forest for long,
where the moon is my guide –
a lantern in the window –
and all curious tracks lead home.
Connemara Moonshine (2002)
Mark Gibbons
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Tags: Missoula, Literary Landscape, outdoors, Mark Gibbons, Literature and poetry