the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, pinball
Number 509, January 15,
2005
Another shot in the
dark.
“If, being animal, we ring like guitar strings to nature’s furies,
what hope can there be for our ultimate, planned peacefulness?”
—John Graves, Goodbye to a River
Home
At
night, as the neighborhood shuts down and goes to sleep, the sounds of movement
sweeps in over this small backyard. It is the sound of evolution, exchange, the
invisible yet relentless and inescapable forces of society and commerce.
This
drone of movement actually forms a constant background radiation, an auditorium
in which the urban environment hangs its ceaseless mobiles of sound. Only when
dogs cease barking, kids stop bouncing basketballs in the schoolyard, and their
yells and squeals trip home behind them does this auditory setting become
apparent. At regular intervals, small jets, and prop and turboprop planes buzz
and hum in low over the oak, elm, and cottonwood into Kansas City’s downtown
airport, located just on the other side of this bluff. Locomotives bustle along
the tracks in the valley, and their rumbles blend with wind and the whine of
tires and engines on the interstate. On the buildings in the West Bottoms,
cooling towers hum in a thousands variations, some smooth and simple, others
jagged and perverse. Metallic thunder starts near the creek and cracks the
length of the valley north as the locomotives set off, pulling against the
couplers of three-quarters of a mile or more of stationary freight or coal
cars, setting tons of steel and hundreds of wheels in motion.
Despite
this metropolitan reverberation, a breathlessness dominates this little yard.
It sits behind my house in a pass between Observation Hill and Irish Hill near
the edge of a bluff. In fact, the base of the incline in my back yard starts
upward toward the summit of Irish Hill. The house casts its shadow over the
yard and the hill, leaving us free of the acidity of the sodium streetlights
out front. On a winter night like tonight the trees in the neighboring lots are
bare. The leaves of the sycamores lining the boulevard rattle dry in the wind.
It brings my vision to the worlds above—stars bright enough to poke through the
light bubble radiating from downtown, the streetlights throwing shadows over
the house into grass at the crest of the hill.
The
stillness makes it seem a place untouched beneath the airplanes, amid the
tumult of interstate and railroad. But this land in my yard has, and always has
had a relationship with (or set of relations to) the larger world, though it
may seem undisturbed. It was both formed by a very real, very human world and
helped to shape and change that world. This ground is as much a function of
human manipulation and natural forces as the rails, factories, streets, and
electric lights I see and hear from it. The social and economic forces of
Indian removal, white settlement, immigration, and of urban expansion, decline,
and renewal have worked on this piece of land, and it has worked on them. This
elliptical relationship, in turn, has determined the meaning and form of this
land, the human decisions that create and devolve neighborhoods, and even my
coming to have a house this most recent incarnation of the community.
More
importantly, the hill will help to determine what I do with it, and in the
process of changing it—even thinking about it—it will change me. At bottom,
there is something irreducibly natural—plants, rain, sun, wind, animals, dirt,
rock. In relation to the houses around it, it is distant, stationary,
unchanging, almost as if the glacial loess and limestone bedrock on which it
stands has shielded it from change. I’ll only ever see or participate in a
fraction of the yard’s human and ecological history, be one player in a cast of
many millions. But already it’s started to re-form me, even as I think about
rebuilding it. And when I begin to impose my will upon it, it will build in me
more than muscle and callus. It will change my personality.
I look
at the backyard everyday from my bedroom window, and mine is not just a glance.
Rather, it is a conscious consideration. What I perceive—house, topography,
neighborhood, and a hundred other cultural constructs—is my home, and my home
has a place in time and history. But home has a whole lot more to do with
workings of a society and the intersection of cultures than my individual
feelings. And when I consider this ground with the steep incline, I think of
the people who used to live here, who shaped and used the ground for their own
purposes, and who may very well have felt about this ground the same way I do
now.
Stone on stone
Soon a wall
A terrace
A garden
Human, earth
Heaven, sun
Grown to one
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