A Matter of Knowledge by Sydney Lea
One of my two sweet younger sisters lives
At our dead bachelor uncle’s farm, from which
She has sent a photo: just after dawn, pale mist
Swathing the pond. I squint through the blur at horses
In the pastures beyond, vague smudges, disembodied.
To contemplate all this means to retrieve
Particular sounds as much as sights: the tock
Of a woodpecker, say, so freighted with wistfulness
My eyes create a further blur. The babel
Of crows far off comes through to me, not raucous
But muted–or rather transmuted–to near melodic.
All looks the way I felt it as a child
In love with what the countryside afforded
To eye and ear, but also, say, the scents
Of tedded hay and, when the breeze came right,
An earthy whiff from the barn where I’d be allowed
From time to time to pull at Guernseys’ udders,
Happy as I have ever known how to be–
Which is doubtless why the photograph implies
What a person may wish not to have witnessed later:
Much of that softness erased, old friends succumbing,
Pernicious clamor of politics, and so on,
Ad infinitum. Thank fortune, though, to know
What I knew–in what I could call the Age of Unknowing–
Would be to milk it, as I couldn’t have known, ever after.
Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His thirteenth collection of poems, Here, is due from Four Way Books this year. Likewise, in fall of 2018, Vermont’s Green Writers Press will publish The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life, his collected newspaper columns from his years (2011-15) as Vermont Poet Laureate. In spring of ‘18, GWP will also re-issue his collaborative book of essays with former Delaware laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives.
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