This poem's a bit of a long haul. Apologies in advance.

William Cullen Bryant, for those of you who don't know, is from the Berkshires, way back. His homestead is Cummington is owned by the organization I used to work for. It's a lovely old house, if you ever get up there (there's also a nice country store at the bottom of the hill, so, really, if you ever get up there). And, interesting bit of information: when Bryant added a second floor he had the first floor lifted up and the new level built beneath it.

Here's his meditation on the prairies. I'm not sure he ever got as far west as I am now, though. Saskatchewan didn't even distinguish itself from the Northwest Territories until 1905.

The Prairies

--These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—
The Prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch,
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless forever. —Motionless?—
No—they are all unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South!
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,
And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high,
Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not—ye have played
Among the palms of Mexico and vines
Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks
That from the fountains of Sonora glide
Into the calm Pacific—have ye fanned
A nobler or a lovelier scene than this?
Man hath no power in all this glorious work:
The hand that built the firmament hath heaved
And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes
With herbage, planted them with island groves,
And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor
For this magnificent temple of the sky—
With flowers whose glory and whose multitude
Rival the constellations! The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,—
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue,
Than that which bends above our eastern hills.

--As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides
The hollow beating of his footsteps seems
A sacrilegious sound. I think of those
Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here—
The dead of other days?—and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds
That overlook the rivers, or that rise
In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,
Answer. A race, that long has passed away,
Built them;—a disciplined and populous race
Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock
The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields
Nourished their harvest, here their herds were fed,
When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke.
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed
In a forgotten language, and old tunes,
From instruments of unremembered form,
Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came—
The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.
The solitude of centuries untold
Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone;
All—save the piles of earth that hold their bones,
The platforms where they worshipped unknown gods,
The barriers which they builded from the soil
To keep the foe at bay—till o’er the walls
The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one,
The strongholds of the plain were forced, and heaped
With corpses. The brown vultures of the wood
Flocked to those vast uncovered sepulchres,
And sat unscared and silent at their feast.
Haply some solitary fugitive,
Lurking in marsh and forest, till the sense
Of desolation and of fear became
Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die.
Man’s better nature triumphed then. Kind words
Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors
Seated the captive with their chiefs; he chose
A bride among their maidens, and at length
Seemed to forget—yet ne’er forgot—the wife
Of his first love, and her sweet little ones,
Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race.

--Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise
Races of living things, glorious in strength,
And perish, as the quickening breath of God
Fills them, or is withdrawn. The red man, too,
Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long,
And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought
A wilder hunting-ground. The beaver builds
No longer by these streams, but far away,
On waters whose blue surface ne’er gave back
The white man’s face—among Missouri’s springs,
And pools whose issues swell the Oregon—
He rears his little Venice. In these plains
The bison feeds no more. Twice twenty leagues
Beyond remotest smoke of hunter’s camp,
Roams the majestic brute, in herds that shake
The earth with thundering steps—yet here I meet
His ancient footprints stamped beside the pool.

--Still this great solitude is quick with life.
Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers
They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds,
And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man,
Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground,
Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer
Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee,
A more adventurous colonist than man,
With whom he came across the eastern deep,
Fills the savannas with his murmurings,
And hides his sweets, as in the golden age,
Within the hollow oak. I listen long
To his domestic hum, and think I hear
The sound of that advancing multitude
Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice
Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn
Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark brown furrows. All at once
A fresher winds sweeps by, and breaks my dream,
And I am in the wilderness alone.

-William Cullen Bryant, 1884

For a Northern Reader

Until the light has
failed as if bereft
the white mist
barely infiltrating
the trees

and as if they were painted
on a green landscape the animals
descending to their black shelters
come to a standstill
at the edge of our gaze

resolute
half his journey done
our ailing neighbor too
pauses
reckoning the distance left

-W. G. Sebald, 2001

This week I drove up to northern Saskatchewan (or, further north than I am--northern Saskatchewan proper is, as I understand it, a mostly roadless expanse of ice and tundra) to attend some meetings. The meetings ostensibly have to do with my research, but mostly it's a way for me to dabble my toes in the communities where I'll be working. I like driving the roads to these out of the way towns (nearly everything in Saskatchewan is out of the way; some provincial highways are dirt roads), waiting for a grain elevator to appear on the horizon (back east, River Road was a common street name--here, it's Elevator Road). And there it is, and there's your next town.

You'll have to go inside to pay for gas in most of these towns. The roads are mostly empty, and when you see another car, it's usually a truck, and it usually hurdles past at a pace well above the speed limit. The world seems quiet and large, at once further apart and closer together. And there's your next town.

Upon a Time

If ever the sweet spring comes,
---I’ll put aside these dead books
And try to feel the herbage freshen
---Along the withered boughs of old dry thoughts.

I’ll walk out somewhere where a garden grows,
---And there I’ll stand some summer evening,
Hat beside elbows on the gray stone wall,
---And the wind will stir, coming from behind the hill.

Afterward I’ll walk home, hands behind me,
---And pause a moment before going in,
Half fancying some one has called my name,
---Or been awakened to a flutter as I passed.

Of course, I’ll enter, but leave the door ajar,
---For someone might come in, you know,
Expectantly I’ll sit to fancy the long evening through
---That a pair of eyes in the summer night

Might light a candle in the dull world,
---So softly that none might see to smile at,
Yet ardently enough—like a vestal candle burning—
---For a little heat in a cold house.

-Jonathan David, 1922

We Started Home, My Son and I

We started home, my son and I.
Twilight already. The young moon
stood in the western sky and beside it
a single star. I showed my son
and explained how the moon should be greeted
and that this star is the moon's servant.
As we neared home, he said
that the moon is far, as far
as that place where we went.
I told him the moon is much, much farther
and reckoned: if one were to walk
ten kilometers each day, it would take
almost a hundred years to reach the moon.
But this was not what he wanted to hear.
The road was already almost dry.
The river was spread on the marsh; ducks and other waterfowl
crowed the beginning of night. The snow's crust
crackled underfoot--it must
have been freezing again. All the houses' windows
were dark. Only in our kitchen
a light shone. Beside our chimney, the shining moon,
and beside the moon, a single star.

-Jaan Kaplinski, 1987

Full moon, tomorrow night.