Perspectives

Snow lies on the grass and the fields, freezes, shoved into huge piles graying with macadam and gravel, trash and mud. Winter abides but only just; even with the cold snap, I sense a kind of anticipatory nudge toward warmer hours and longer days. It gets me thinking about my perspective on seasons. The lunisolar calendar I mentioned in a previous post seems more appropriate to my experience than the Gregorian, and perhaps the reason is that NongLi originated as, and essentially remains, an agricultural calendar.

The Things of This World

The things of this world that matter
are of a personal nature: redpolls
and ovenbirds, tidal waters, the sounds
of freight trains hurtling heavily on rails,
horns wailing; rattle-clap thunder;
patterns lace leaves when pressed
against the inner thigh; and justice.

The things that matter always matter
mostly from one perspective
which varies from yours to mine,
solid to liquid, season, valley, treetop,
galaxy, gorge, gray matter, anti-
matter, energy. The things of this world
depend on the heuristics what and how:

how we define this world, how define
what matters and what makes things yours
or mine: my mushrooms, my macaroons,
my highway, spring light, continental
shelf, hummingbird, suspension bridge,
my mountain, my miracle, mine—

~~

Human beings can hardly avoid seeing things from a human perspective, though human perspectives can differ vastly. But we do have the knee-jerk tendency to view other beings as “ours.” The Judeo-Christian biblical approach basically states that God gave us everything, and it’s ours to eat and to command; some interpretations temper that statement as stewardship rather than ownership, but just read Genesis 1:28-30 in the King James version–

 

 

 

…and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

²⁹ And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

³⁰ And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

Which perspective I’m illustrating in the poem above. The poem’s speaker aggregates everything into the personal construct of ownership: what is owned is what matters. Implications of greed, of personal views on justice, of personal definitions (how points of view get tainted as they run through human beings’ individual filters)–those abstract ideas the poem tries to convey through the concrete images of animals, sounds, foodstuffs, geology.

The first-person possessive pronoun permits English speakers to colonize the cosmos. Often, I catch myself in claiming “mine.” My house, my meadow, my cat, my children! As if I could actually own any of them (although I possess a piece of paper that asserts that I own my house, sometimes I have my doubts). I did not intend, when I started writing this poem, to remind myself not to go about “making it all about me.” But it does serve as a reminder. And I think a few of us human beings ought to be more aware that our tendency to hoard and claim may not serve us, or the world, all that well.

Goldfinches in winter attire