I'm going to change landscapes now and come back and do
one last Montana poem to close with.
In 1982 I finished my MFA at the University of Montana,
where I studied with Dick Hugo and some other people,
and went off to teach it at LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
in their program down there.
And it's interesting.
I mean, not only did I lose my landscape,
but I also found I lost my language as well.
Diane Wakoski speculates that so many of us
are writing about nature because we're all displaced academics.
Academically, we're all displaced,
and we're not in the place we really want to be,
and we're longing for that place.
I'm now back in the place, more or less, I want to be.
But anyway, the one thing that kept
coming to mind when I moved down there
was that Huxley essay Wordsworth in the Tropics
where he speculates there never would
have been a romantic poetry if the lake
poets, and particularly Wordsworth, had lived closer
to the equator.
The basic idea being you can't love nature
when it's growing on you.
And so this fed this poem.
"On the Veranda We Drink Gin and Tonic."
"The elephant ears tired of hearing witty stories
twist flat on their stems.
The flashy camellias drop to the lawn like abandoned prom
dresses.
In Baton Rouge the falling over begins.
Unmindful, we might dissolve like aspirin
in this moist night air.
If it's not the falling over, it's the standing up.
The bartender keeps a battalion of rags in white uniform.
I've seen him beat a peacock rug to bloody red.
Isn't that how the Cubists began?
Separating the white threads of canvas
into a field of broken glass?
"Nature Morte," shaping the guitar from wood grain paper,
laying it flat so that one might embrace every side at once.
Three women lean on their elbows like collapsing tripods
and see how their malaise fractures
into radiant blue prisms.
With a moment's stay against geometry,
this landscape could turn suddenly impolite.
We might break each other open like the clear pink coat
of a shrimp.
Perhaps we'd become friends the way cartoonists drew
Frankenstein's scars with zippers, as if anyone
could enter his curious skin."