#1: James Wright's "A Blessing" and Steve Scafidi's "For the Last American Buffalo"

Encounters with the tender and sublime.

Apr 13, 2023

A Blessing

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Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs. 
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

From Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)

There’s a sense of quietude that arrives when you come face-to-face with an animal in the wild. Even - or especially - in stillness, you can sense the breath, heft, power. One night around this time last year, I stood face-to-face with a zebra, barely a meter away. I remember thinking the zebra seemed gently curious, if not bold. Was it calm, or roiling internally with kinetic energy frozen into inaction? Which of us was afraid of the other? I couldn’t know. But I felt an intrinsic pull to move closer, even to reach out a hand and stroke its coat.

I didn’t, of course. Wild animals are unpredictable. And human animals, perhaps, are the wildest and most unpredictable of them all.

James Wright’s “A Blessing” has long been a favourite poem of mine, one that feels like an old friend to return to. It almost makes me cry every time. Not in a sad way, although there is a tinge of melancholy to the poem. More so in a sublime way: neither happy nor sad but a third thing, grand and wholly separate from pedestrian emotional valuations. It’s about being alive to the vast animal mechanisms of the world, something akin to an epiphany. The poem itself embodies the feeling it describes: a finely attuned cracking-open, an awakeness to a slim, essential kernel within. “A Blessing” was first published in Wright's third collection, The Branch Will Not Break (1963), which sees him experimenting with free verse lyric - a stylistic departure from his previous, more formally closed verse. This is a poem with an emotional drive built on imagery and economy of language, rather than by rhyme or meter. Not to say that these two modes are mutually exclusive; rather, they’re just very different engines to generate the energy or tension that a poem requires.

I’m struck by the specificity of the opening lines, which situate us firmly in geography and time, and bring a sense of arrival and intentionality. There’s been a choice to take this particular exit off the highway. It’s the end of the day. Twilight is a liminal time (I think of Mary Ruefle’s poem “On Twilight”: “When you are finally lost in the / twilight, you cannot judge anything”). Here, though, twilight “bounds softly forth,” exuberant and keen. And then there are the horses, “those two Indian ponies”: the syntax implying that these animals are already known, even predestined. What a sense of enveloping familiarity, inevitability, is held within these layers of description. There is something of a pilgrimage here: an intense journey of loneliness and rapture. “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” As poet Pádraig Ó Tuama puts it, the poem holds these complicated moods together “in something that’s so uplifting but that isn’t saccharine.”

What is the blessing in the poem’s title, I wonder - who performs it and who receives it? Perhaps the blessing is the pony nuzzling the speaker’s hand. Perhaps the blessing is the arrival of the speaker and his friend to this lonely paddock. Perhaps the blessing is the ginger step over barbed wire into the pasture, or the touch of a horse’s delicate ear, or the gentle descent of dusk. Perhaps the blessing is the breeze itself. The fine mystery of the animal mind. The tension of eager muscle and heart. Perhaps the blessing is all of the above: these mundane, extraordinary tendernesses.

—

For the Last American Buffalo

By Steve Scafidi

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Because words dazzle in the dizzy light of things
and the soul is like an animal–hunted and slow–
this buffalo walks through me every night as if I was
some kind of prairie and hunkers against the cold dark,
snorting under the stars while the fog of its breathing
rises in the air, and it is the loneliest feeling I know
to approach it slowly with my hand outstretched
to tenderly touch the heavy skull furred and rough
and stroke that place huge between its ears where
what I think and what it thinks are one singing thing
so quiet that, when I wake, I seldom remember
walking beside it and whispering in its ear quietly
passing the miles, the two of us, as if Cheyenne or
the lights of San Francisco were our unlikely destination
and sometimes trains pass us and no one leans out hard
in the dark aiming to end us and so we continue on
somehow and today while the seismic quietness of
the earth spun beneath my feet and while the world
I guess carried on, that lumbering thing moved heavy
thick and dark through the dreams I believe we keep
having whether we sleep or not and when you see it
again say I’m sorry for things you didn’t do and
then offer it some sweet-grass and tell it stories
you remember from the star-chamber of the womb
or at least the latest joke, something good to keep it
company as otherwise it doesn’t know you are here
for love, and like the world tonight, doesn’t really
care whether we live or die. Tell it you do and why.

From Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (LSU, 2001).

Steve Scafidi’s “For the Last American Buffalo” gives me a similar sense of shivering awe to read. This a poem imbued with awareness and movement on a scale that feels staggeringly large but also minutely honed. Writer Devin Kelly puts it thusly, and I couldn’t agree more: “Reading Scafidi is, for me, like that first encounter one has with geologic time. His poems do that miraculous work of gracing each moment of ordinary life with what each moment of ordinary life offers: despair and beauty, miracle and failure.”

“The soul is like an animal–hunted and slow,” Scafidi writes, and the rest of the poem follows this meandering, numinous, sometimes lumbering, and ever-present journey; the constant vibrancy of existence that moves and breathes through us all as we sleep and dream and walk and live. Like the previous poem, there is a description here too of reaching out - “slowly with my hand outstretched” - to make physical contact with this great, almost mythic animal. In this moment of communion the soul-animal and the self join together. They are not quite combined, but are in tandem, even - devastatingly - asymptotic.

What really bowls me over here (do people still use that phrase?) is the dizzying structure of the poem. It’s all one sentence. The poem gathers momentum into the gallop of a powerful beast treading ground - until it all grinds to a pause for the poem’s final line, commanding in its simplicity. How incisive, this shift - this “seismic quietness”. This is where the endangered soul slows its motion. This is where the long journey leads back into itself. There is always the chance to stop the train for a moment and say to yourself: Yes, this is where I’m going. This is what I want in this life. Here is why.

In her tremendous memoir, H is For Hawk, Helen Macdonald writes: “I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.”

That’s what both of these poems boil down to, isn’t it? An intense encounter with wildness, whether external or internal. A meditation on the psychic grace that such an encounter holds - or, perhaps more importantly, the meaning that we attach to it. This stepping into the tender world of the soul; this breaking into blossom.

Until next time,

Maddy x

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