Landscape Variations
I come back to you, stunned lane, hoared by
the freezing sheets, locked inside the white
chapels of winter, boot pressing into your
slender gravels, your black spine – we drift blind
through puzzled combs of mist, a hallowed truancy,
this hour, its dark fluxing our veins.
*
Evening, its rusted sculleries, ice-shoggled, hasks
at the wooded ulnas, vowels scalding
our path ways. What else but this: the body un-
latched by night’s frequencies, a wind’s larceny,
its archives flushing the antlered wood, a noise
inseparable from me – irons gabled to the land.
*
A pond’s metal, my insomnia eye, the sculled
iris of crow. Black splinter, you travel lawless across
the convent waters, my tremolo, a toppled star
torn from hymnal attics. Dear pioneer, you ink
the pike lit surfaces, a felled cultic, hatching there.
Your unmoored shadow keys the evening waters.
*
What of the sycamore, a soliloquy of branches,
the endless casting of its prayer? Above me
the sky aches in her sooted lung, and what is left?
My shadow rooting through the natal weeds,
stitched to their green seam, a sycamore’s voltage
at my back, this boreal fuse driving the body home.
| Adam Chiles |
|
levelheaded: Landscape Variations
As we seem to relearn every spring, seasonal changes are imperfect. Winter doesn’t simply end; it glides and stutters into spring then into summer then fall. Likewise, the four sections of “Landscape Variations” do not refer explicitly to four distinct seasons, but they move fluidly from a place “locked inside the white / chapels of winter” to a place where we find “natal weeds, / stitched to their green seam.” Any four-part pastoral poem asks to be read with seasonal change in mind. This framework helps us understand we aren’t looking at a static landscape. (It might be a stretch to take this idea further, but we could also point out there are 24 lines, or a couplet for each month of the year.)
Whatever the poem intends formally, the poem is broadly about change, hence “Variations.” Particularly, it is about change as applied to nature and the language we use to describe the natural world. The poem offers up some quite beautiful language – “puzzled combs of mist,” “a toppled star / torn from hymnal attics,” “this boreal fuse driving the body home” – but much of this language is also quite mysterious. What are “puzzled combs of mist?” What makes them “puzzled?” Is our own puzzlement meant as an enactment of the labyrinthine quality of a foggy night?
Even clearer lines take some work. The “Black splinter” of the third stanza seems to refer to a log afloat in an aforementioned pond. It is a “toppled star” because it comes from high in the forest’s canopy. It is torn from “hymnal attics” because, again, it is high in the sky where the wind blows and howls. From this, we might extrapolate that the speaker is witness to variations in the landscape that take place over many years, not just the seasonal changes of one year. We could go further and see the dead log as representative of the deathward direction of the woods regionally, or the direction of nature globally.
With enough attention, every phrase might be reeled out into a particular image or particular idea, but each time we reach that final image – let’s say fish nibbling at the surface of an otherwise still pond (“pike lit surfaces”) – our attention shifts to another vaguely referential phrase. With this, the poem is not only about (and maybe not even primarily about) literal changes in a landscape over time but also the minute-to-minute changes that occur in us as observers. The poem points out the complexity of observation amid all these macro and micro changes. What was “locked inside the white / chapels of winter” becomes “ice-shoggled” – two ways of saying the same thing, but of course also saying something very different. As the world around us changes, the observer also changes, and ultimately the poem’s “Variations” belong to us as much as any landscape.
– The Editors
