Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village

This is a very old poem-sequence. It dates back to the 1970s when I was living in New York but still obsessed with the little lake-side village of Edinboro, PA, where I had attended college. This "Tableaux" was in my 1973 collection as just a series of nature impressions. All four parts are about the lake, the trees and plants around it, the bats and ducks and frogs. The central part is a meditation on the eons-long battle between lake and shore: vegetation wants to fill things in; water wants to have its way. There are no people in this poem, other than the poet-observer. I think this revision has made the poems more than they were before (the war sequence now cast completely in blank verse). The last part is a Whitmanesque cry of joy at one sight of spring willow trees against a gray sky, a sublime moment. So here it is, as it will appear in my next book.

Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village

1
Cloud Actors
Spotlit to the last,
the thunderheads recede
southeast, in sunset red,
like hoary-headed thespians
unwilling to exeunt
without a proper flourish.

Inside the clouds,
the stubborn lightning
flashes, as if another act
of Hamlet or Lear
required its illumination.
The last of day
does not take curtain calls,
trailing the curtain of eventide
it rolls off the storm’s advance
into the night’s
dark amphitheater.
The lights go out.

2
The Bats At Dusk, The Ducks Withdraw
See them now, dart silhouette
in their new-bird pride!
The bats — presumptuous mice —
take wing, upwards on a twilit wind,
downwards into a gnat-rich dusk.

As ducks float south,
the backs of white mallards
turn like the final page
of a silk-lined novel,
flap shut in sun-gem’s fall
from weeping willow tapestry.

From the bridge I eye flock’s
     cooling retreat, 
the “V” of their coming
an almost-“A” arrow departing
passive in downstream current,
each quack from on the water
answered by croak
from a somnolent frog.
Above the processional,
the celebrant fledermice,
afloat on sonar-guided updraft,
feasting on bug-fest 
     with open mouths,
squeak-flap chitter their exultation,
beat on past dusk
     toward the stars.

3
War of the Lake Against Its Borders
In war, old men give out the orders —
      the young men march out and die.
The already-dead in their Civil War,
World War One and Two grave plots, silent lie,
drum-taps and bugles and epaulets gone.
Nothing down there in the lakeside graveyard
but pine-box rot and the long slur of worms,
but up here, the ancient maples have made
against wind and water, a palisade,
gray warriors stiff-stern at the lake-edge. 
They bend their grave green heads in counsel, brush
shagged samaras in a windy tumult,
send gossip-squirrel couriers to branch-
end, the golden leaflets propelling down,
leaf-pile wind-pushed advance to battlefield.
They argue tactics, instruct the saplings,
shudder in windy speeches, arthritic.
They are the proud maple-leaf generals. 
The Lake is their ancient, blind nemesis.
A hundred years they have contained him. 
Root-strong, they know they will one day surround
and absorb him, tame him to pond, to puddle.
to a mere widening of snow-filled creeks.

His Majesty the Lake must be content
to weave a plot for the millennium,
to gnaw on pebbles ignominious,
to swell with the creek-and-rainfall tribute,
smug at the man-made dam that deepened him.
He dreams of expanded borders, does naught
but lap his decadent breakers, weak-wan 
against sand and silt of the pebbled shore,
hunched in the kettle the glaciers carved him.
He frightens no one, looks to mystic clouds
for auguries, sleeps in the afternoons,
interrogates the fishes and flotsam,
attempts to read news from the incoming Braille 
of pelting rain drops (all reassuring),
traces lake’s ice cracks in dead of winter
but fails to detect the coded messages.
No one betrays the tree-army’s secrets.

Now it is spring. The officers conspire,
draw from sun-dew a seedling explosion.
They raise up a line of green colossi:
rusty, bellicose day lily dragons
issue their challenge to cowardly waves.
Others are drafted, too: spies creep
toward the water in a bed of moss.
Fern leaves unfurl their flagrant green pennants.
Foot soldier fungi pop up red-capped, spores 
ready to replenish their short-lived selves.
Roots furrow underground, touch hands and hold.

Lake’s King has weapons, too: one night a fog
clouds up the foe’s senses in fairy mist.
Then comes the rain — an equinoctial storm —
A night of cold downpour — a deluged day —
a night more of of starless, moonless cloudburst.
Waves batter-ram the tree-line barricades.
Muscles renewed and tendons vivified,
he roars like an ocean, spews tidal spray.

The border army breaks, then mends, then holds.
Where roots had lost the soil to cling to,
a tree falls willingly to barricade
with leaf and limb and sundered trunk.
Where water attempts to break the land,
elsewhere, a rope-tough vine, a wild-rose thorn,
a dead-tree pike-shaft punctures him. Roots hold.
Howling and humbled the Lake-King retreats.
His waves recede to a mirror stillness.

At sun-up, the silver orb of Venus
looks down and sees her own slender crescent;
bird echoes bird arc in parallel flight;
each cloud regards his symmetric brother.
The tangled flora begins to heal itself.
Who won the war? Look at the lake edge now,
see that parade-line stiff and pluming there,
as day lilies burn gold against the light!

4
Stormy Day in Spring
No one goes out on these cloudy days.
The forest is empty. A willow tree
burns in first green, vibrant
against a red-gray skillet of clouds.
Was green ever greener than this?
This is the secret hue of spring,
saved for the rainy-day elite!

The civilized ones! They are all indoors
with damp umbrellas, their soggy shoes drying,
while I stand here on the stream bed,
alone as though their world had ended.
I look at the backs of houses: no one
comes down to the stream-bed
to exult with me in willow-rapture.

Keep your clapboards and chimneys!
Give me this brooding, north-born sky,
the ardent chill of this windy noon —
give me a little sun — a beam or two
to slice the scudding rain clouds.
Splash rainbows on the canopy
of gray and brown and emerald.

Give me this — there is nothing sweeter
than this encompassing embrace!
To be alive, alone
amid the willows and the indifferent rain,
to be at the apex of consciousness —
to feel the very pulse of life evolving —
green! green and alive upon the world!