Owe Awe

In terza rima James Pollock takes us on a tour of Quarry Park, Madison, Wisconsin. The tour includes a duet with a cardinal, musings on the shaping of the landscape by ice-age glacial pressure, the tumbling climb and repeated exertions of a two-and-a-half-year-old, an amazing observation of ants feeding off of aphids and fending off a ladybug attack on their source of aphid nectar, the burial practices of first peoples, the rowan and other plantings of a family that inhabited the site. It's rich and engaging and clips along in part due to the deft handling of the interlocking rhyme scheme. Difficult to choose a passage to pick up but here is an apt act of thanksgiving told askant:

even in the midst of death; how we forget
and how our forgetting makes us homeless
until we dig ourselves out of this debt

we owe the giant past for making us
ourselves. [...]

In some very strong fashion the writing of poetry and its sharing with others is a way to acknowledge debt and in such acknowledgement is a way out of debt. We do find our way to home through acquaintance with our surroundings and their history, recent and remote. We are enjoined to not forget as a step to remembering. It is worth stressing the multiple: it is ourselves that are remembered by not forgetting and being mindful of debt of that singular circumstance that is the "giant past".

Pollock's poem "Quarry Park" is found in Sailing to Babylon.

And so for day 1148
03.02.2010