Oak on a Knoll

I cannot now recall my first encounter with Spoon River Anthology.  I must have been quite young as it did not occur to me at the time to wonder that the little stream I had known all my life (for the Spoon was no more than a stream in Stark County), was the subject of a famous book of literature.  It was a point of fascination, to be sure, but it was also, somehow, just a part of the landscape that had always been there and taken for granted, like an old tree on a knoll.  I had noticed it and wondered about it, but no one else seemed to.  No one in my family knew anything at all about Spoon River Anthology, and it never occured to me to ask my teachers.  I never asked anyone about the books I was reading, anyway, as reading was such a personal, private matter.

One thing I do remember about my earliest encounter with the Anthology was the provocative little drawings by Oliver Herford which delighted and fascinated me, and prompted me to stow the book where my mother was unlikely to find it. The poems themselves were something else!—unlike anything I had ever encountered. They were direct and plain enough that even as a child I could understand them, but the emotions and behavior they described, mostly having to do with sex, legal matters and murder, were all but incomprehensible. Nevertheless, from the beginning, and especially as I entered my mid-teens, there were particular poems which drew me, and mirrored my own experience of the world I knew.

Hare Drummer

 

Do the boys and girls still go to Siever’s

For cider, after school, in late September?

Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets

On Aaron Hatfield’s farm when the frosts begin?

For many times with the laughing girls and boys

Played I along the road and over the hills

When the sun was low and the air was cool, 

Stopping to club the walnut tree

Standing leafless against a flaming west.

Now, the smell of the autumn smoke,

And the dropping acorns,

And the echoes about the vales

Bring dreams of life.

They hover over me.

They question me:

Where are those laughing comrades?

How many are with me, how many

In the old orchards along the way to Siever’s,

And in the woods that overlook

The quiet water?

 

Conrad Siever

 

Not in that wasted garden

Where bodies are drawn into grass

That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens

That bear no fruit—

There where along the shaded walks

Vain sighs are heard,

And vainer dreams are dreamed

Of close communion with departed souls—

But here under the apple tree

I loved and watched and pruned

With gnarled hands

In the long, long years;

Here under the roots of this northern-spy

To move in the chemic change and circle of life,

Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree,

And into the living epitaphs

Of redder apples!

 

 

The countryside described in these two poems— of orchards, farms and graveyards— of trees against the sunset along a river I had always known— was my own world presented back to me through the clarifying lens of poetry. It was enchanting and mesmerizing. It drew me into a world of reverie which would only expand over time and lead me to my first uncertain attempts at rendering that world for myself. 

  But first of all, as it seemed to me (and must surely seem to every regionalist writer), I required a place on which to stand— a vantage from which to survey the world, like an oak on a knoll— a home that I could rely upon, and by which I could orient himself— a home where I would be rooted not only in my own personal history, but in the deep cultural and spiritual history of the place itself, even as my limbs and leaves responded to the winds of unfolding events. Not that I had as yet articulated such things to myself, but they were what I felt and longed for, however vaguely I understood them. 

  Certainly there was Spoon River, the actual river known to myself and my father and his father, where I had spent my boyhood and where both sides of my family had farmed since the Civil War.  And then there was the Spoon River of literature, as profoundly entwined in American lore and mythology as the Shenandoah or Missouri.  That was the Spoon River of Edgar Lee Masters who, as it happened, had died just five days before I was born.  Our Spoon near the source, and his Spoon near the mouth were separated by a hundred miles of farmland and small towns, and not until I was in my twenties did I venture down the highway alone in my old Ford pickup to visit Oak Hill Cemetery just outside of Lewistown, where so many of the inhabitants of his Anthology have their graves. 

  And so (I was convinced) I had my literal and literary home, my knoll so to speak, overlooking Spoon River. But in the intervening years between my boyhood and my young adulthood, I had wandered away, both outwardly and inwardly— turned away, wandered away, and lost my way, in more ways than I could count. My ‘knoll’ was lost to me and I could not yet see how to find it again. I was living by this time a hundred miles to the north, in an old residential district of Rockford on the bank of Rock River, and it was from there that I made my way back to the Spoon for a final visit to my paternal grandparents—a final visit that provided the occasion of one of my earliest Stark County poems.

A Place of Old Trees, Set Back from the Road

 

It was a good six miles of hard road

south from the farm to where we turned east

and wound our way up among the wooded

bluffs and knolls overlooking Spoon River.

We dipped down into a little descent,

rattled across the bridge and with Grandpa

downshifting smoothly we nosed uphill,

the rough old engine reduced to a groan.

Where the road leveled out just below the ridge

we turned down a narrow byway through trees

that directly opened into a clearing,

a small and secluded cloister of oak

and maple spreading their battered old boughs

horizontally over a field of graves.

 

Grandfather pulled up into the shade

of the centermost maple and, shutting off

the engine, twisted the radio dial.

I heard my grandmother stirring behind us,

collecting her bucket and jars.  “He likes

to sleep to the sound of the game,” she said.

“You can do as you like.”  For a while

I followed her on her rounds, conveying

the bucket back and forth to the pump

and holding it as she dipped with a jar,

but after awhile I sensed her unease.

“Wouldn’t you rather just rest in the shade?”

So I sat on a fallen granite slab

beneath a maple and watched as she moved

among rows of tilted and broken stones,

pausing every so often to water

an overgrown tangle of wild rose,

a cluster of mums, or of marigold.

As always she wore a shapeless old dress

and her hair was pinned so close to her scalp

it failed to soften the curve of her skull.

She moved with a spareness molded by years

of never-completed tasks, a spareness

molded by wind and rain.

 

                                       I had never

spoken to her of my world, of the other

life that existed beyond Spoon River.

To her it was all a bewilderment

and nothing at all to do with her world.

And watching her there, in that undisturbed,

inviolate grove of ancestral oaks

and familial plots, the outside world

receded to little more than the noise

of a half-heard radio in a Ford

where my grandfather rested with eyes closed,

drowsing to the far-away rise and fall

of cheering from Wrigley Field.

 

 

                                                   Nothing much

had changed in that place since the Civil War:

the creeping of moss over chiseled stone,

the spreading of lichen, the settling of graves,

the random collapse of a tree, little else.

I felt I was slowly awakening from

a dream of unreality where

I had passed my life in a kind of fog,

awakening now to this sanctified space

where my grandmother moved among weathered stones

as her mother and her mother’s mother

had moved before her, here in this place

where the other world extending beyond

the valley of the Spoon was nothing more

than a thread of attenuated noise

from a dashboard radio, all but lost

in the sighing of grasses on sunken graves,

in the slow autumnal moaning and creak

of hemlock boughs overarching the dead.

This poem lay bare my dilemma. Even as I identified and set out to claim my home ground, I was not at all certain I could find my way back. Would the old maps still hold?-- the old landmarks still rise up from the fields as I remembered them?-- or had the orienting stars shifted in my absence? There was no straight-forward answer to such questions.  For myself, the way back required a series of return trips over several decades---  in spite of numerous personal disruptions and losses--- to visit among family and friends still living in Stark County, with long discussions and relating of stories, supplemented by my own research into the history of the county and region.  These pilgrimages back to my home country began in my twenties and lasted into my late fifties. Finally, in my sixtieth year, I gathered together some fifty poems, many of which I had published in various journals over the previous twenty years, and collected them into a book which I designed myself and titled simply Stark County Poems.  As a prelude to the collection, I wrote a descriptive meditation in blank-verse about an old oak on a knoll, which in many ways summed up my physical and spiritual return to the valley of the Spoon.

The Old Pasture Oak

 

It had always been there, crowning the knoll

for as long as the boy could remember

and even longer than that, for as long

as his father and even his old grandfather

could quite recall. He had heard it said

that the oak was already old when the first

New Englanders and Kentuckians came

to erect their cabins on Spoon River

in the 1830s— and, earlier still,

that bands of Pottawatomi hunters

had stopped to rest in its shade, or so

his grandfather claimed and, as certain proof,

produced a small arrowhead from a drawer

in his roll-top desk and related how

he had found it tucked in the old oak’s roots

when he was a lad himself. Which was proof

enough for the boy, never mind how the father

rolled his eyes. And for his own part,

the boy more than half believed the oak

was as old as the earth itself, with roots

that clasped the eroded outcrop like claws

and limbs that almost encompassed the clouds.

Whenever he managed to steal away,

he would follow a path along Indian Creek

to a sloping pasture that led to the oak

and, clambering up the knoll, he would curl

in a hollow among the roots and watch

as the cattle languidly grazed in the sun

or reclined to ruminate in the shade.

He might lie in a pastoral reverie

through the whole of an August afternoon,

whenever he thought he wouldn’t be missed

and where few were likely to look for him.

He would drift in and out of consciousness

as he watched the thunderheads cross the sky,

dreaming of the earth as it once had been

when the Pottawatomi hunted there,

and dreaming, as well, of an earlier time

when mammoths and bison had crossed the plain

like the flowing of grasses beneath the wind.

And so it transpired that, gradually,

over months and years, the rooted old oak

so infused the thoughts and dreams of the boy

in accordance with some archaic bond

of men and trees, that he slowly assumed

characteristics of the old tree itself,

becoming stubborn and deeply attached

to a single place, steadfast alike

in sun and in storm and set in his ways,

partial to rain, indifferent to cold,

inclined to the moon and the dark of night.

And when, at the end of his life, he returned

to that peaceful knoll, long after the farm

had been passed along to some stranger’s son

who lived in another state altogether,

the oak stood in ruin, its mighty trunk

hollowed out and its once ennobled crown

entirely shattered by midsummer storms

and lightning strikes, a mere wreck of itself.

The old man stopped, as he generally did

while he was still some distance away

and surveyed the knoll that rose up ahead.

The oak still lived, its bleakly disfigured

and broken stature encircled in leaves.

A single crow on its uppermost snag

alerted the country with three hoarse caws,

then silently flew away to the north

toward a darkening wood. Within the oak’s

elipse of shadow, a solitary bull

interrupted his grazing to raise his head

and regard the intruder with cool disdain

before turning back to his grass again.

The old man leaned on his walking stick

and kept his distance, observing the slow

dispersal of amber across the land

until all of the far-off clustered farms,

tree-lined fencerows and old sycamores

along Spoon River were starting to glow.

The old man was tired, his every joint ached

and he understood that the time had come

when he should be walking away. In the West,

as dusk was blurring the outermost fields,

the dying and truncated oak receded

into the shadowed past, disappearing

layer by layer, subsiding away

like a memory on the verge of sleep,

until only a ghostly trace remained

as a pale silhouette against the sky.