Beyond The Nature Wall
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The Poem
Beyond The Nature Wall
This morning I found a wheellying in the red dirtthe way a tired thing lies down —not fallen, exactly,but done.No car. No explanation.Just the wheel,and the particular patience of objectsthat have already been somewhereand aren’t anymore.
I have been thinking about doors.There are five of themstanding in the desertwithout walls, without houses,as if someone believed that the frame was the point,that the choosing was the point,that you could stand in red dustunder the specific blue of a Tuesday skyand select your horizon from a menu.
Behind one of them, a room.Behind the room, a window.Behind the window,figures bent to the earth in the field —and at the end of the field,where the land should open into more land,into the honest continuation of itself,something grey and long and settledruns from one edge of seeing to the other.I looked for a long time.I wanted it to be weather.
A woman stands at the open door with a suitcase.She has been standing here since before I arrived,which means she was here before the coffee,before the waving couple in their good clothes,before the golden light that pours from the warmest doorthe way warmth always pours from the doorthat leads somewhere no one has described to you in any detail.She has not turned around.I understand this.When you turn around in a desertyou see the same wall you were trying to choose away from.
She has not turned around
Below the white fence —and there is always a fence,decorative, American,painted the specific white of a thingthat wants to be looked at rather than examined —below it, the children.Upside down from where I stand,or I am upside down from where they are,it depends on which world you consider the one that’s right-side up,which is, I think, the whole question,which is the only question this desert has ever been asking.
They are playing.Of course they are playing.The lines that hold them to the world aboveare thin and silverand radiate outwardlike the honest diagramof how we are connected to what we said we didn’t do.
At the center of the inverted trees, a tower.I won’t tell you what kind.You know what kind.The children know what kind and play anyway,which is either the bravest thingor the most ordinary thingand I have lived long enough to knowthose are the same thingwearing different coats in the same desert.
At the center of the inverted trees, a tower
Here is what I believe:the wheel did not fall.The woman will not move.The wall at the horizon was not built in a daybut was completed one.
The grasshopper,who does not know about walls,is crossing the red dirt near my foot right now.She is going somewhere without a door.She will get there.I have seen this.I have stood in enough fields to knowthat the land continueson the other side of every permanent thingwe’ve ever built to stop it —patient, specific,and not, it turns out, asking our permission.
Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?
There are five doors in the desert.
None of them lead out of it.