Moss
Mushrooms
Grass
Emily Dickinson and Startled Grass
ED’s letter, I found a description of the change is season from summer to winter in it that I’d like to remember:
When I saw you last, it was Mighty Summer‹Now the Grass is Glass and the Meadow Stucco, and “Still Waters” in the Pool where the Frog drinks.
letter
Grass is Glass and the Meadow Stucco? Love it!
I just looked up “startle” in Ed’s lexicon. Here are the two definitions offered:
- Shake or twitch due to terror or unexpected surprise.
- Be filled with fright; become shocked.
It also directed me to see “start.” Here are those definitions:
start (-ed), v. [OE ‘to overthrow, overturn, empty, to pour out, to rush, to gush out’.] (webplay: quick, quickened).
- Spring to attention.
- Become active; to come into motion.
- Begin; to come into being.
- Incite; startle; suddenly bother; abruptly rouse with alarm; movement of body involuntarily due to surprise, fright, etc.
- Begin a trip or journey to a certain destination.
And, here’s a poem from ED with startled grass:
PRESENTIMENT is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down;
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.
note: presentiment = foreboding
Returning to the letter and connecting to something else I found in an article titled, “The Sound of Startled Grass” about how composers are inspire by ED:
But I think composers are attracted to more than just her [ED] poems’ musicality. She repeatedly presents herself as a music-maker, surrounded by music. Her experience is constantly musical.
The Sound of Startled Grass
from 1 april 2022: I remember thinking about the sound of startled grass — how would that sound? And then I thought about what startled grass might look like, how it might startle us. Then I thought about the grass on graves and Whitman’s uncut hair and ED’s “The Color of the Grave is Green”:
The Color of the Grave is Green –
The Outer Grave – I mean –
You would not know it from the Field –
Except it own a Stone –
To help the fond – to find it –
Too infinite asleep
To stop and tell them where it is –
But just a Daisy – deep –
Diane Seuss and the dead reaching up through the grass
After bookmarking it at least a week ago, I finally read Diane Seuss’s fabulous Commencement Address to the Bennington Writing Seminars posted on LitHub. I didn’t anticipate how it might fit with my before and during run thoughts, but it does, particularly the bit about grass and graves and the dead speaking to us, and us giving our attention.
A thought: Could we be the startled grass, surprised, shocked, fearful, but astonished, in wonder, alive and willing to reach down to the dead to give attention and life to their stories and to tell our own?
Walt Whitman
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Mary Oliver
Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise
The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver
in gauze and halos.
Maybe as grass, and slowly.
Maybe as the long leaved, beautiful grass
“the prayers that are made out of grass” Praying/ Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver’s mention of grass reminded me of a poem I like by Victoria Chang, which led me to a log entry from Jan 11, 2022:
Left Open / Victoria Chang
We can’t see beyond
the crest of the wooden gate.
We are carriers
of grass yet to be grown. We
aren’t made of cells, but of fields.
I like this idea of being a carrier of grass yet to be grown. My first thought was of grass on graves — Whitman’s “uncut hair of graves” or Dickinson’s “The color of the grave is green”. Then I thought of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “To the Young Who Want to Die”:
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
Walt Whitman and the Uncut Hair of Graves
Song of Myself, 6 [A child said, What is the grass?]/ Walt Whitman
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Grassy Sound/ A. R. Ammons
It occurred to me there are no sharp corners
in the wind
and I was very glad to think
I had so close a neighbor
to my thoughts but decided to sleep before
inquiring
The next morning I got up early
and after yesterday had come
clear again went
down to the salt marshes
to talk with
the straight wind there
I have observed I said
your formlessness
and am
enchanted to know how
you manage loose to be
so influential
The wind came as grassy sound
and between its
grassy teeth
spoke words said with grass
and read itself
on tidal creeks as on
the screens of oscilloscopes
A heron opposing
it rose wing to wind
turned and glided to another creek
so I named a body of water
Grassy Sound
and came home dissatisfied there
had been no direct reply
but rubbed with my soul an
apple to eat
till it shone
Green Sleep
Green Swoon/ Jonathan Weinert
When we were dead, our vexed
tongues hung limp.
You’d made your done face, more or less,
and that was it.
We slept a slow green sleep.
And then the grass grew bronze and stiff
and all we knew was grass
and the ways through grass
and the small strange laws of sleep.
There the ferns grew like hair on the heads of the old dead.
The young dead ate their jam of fig and white cheese.
We wrote our odes and told our jokes
and laughed or rolled our hard white eyes.
You’d think we’d grow as tired of this as we had in life.
But when the weird bell called
and the halls of the dead were filled with the smells
of pine and moss, then how
we loved our deaths the more
and kept on in the ways of death
and left the chance of new life to the ones
who weren’t yet done with time.
We were. We’d get in bed there,
in the grass town of the dead,
left leg to right leg, sex to sex,
and let death flow from chest to chest,
a cold sweet air we had no need to breathe,
and hold it there in a deep green swoon
while the earth filled up with dust
and passed through an age of dust
on its way to the last days of dust.
grass as threshold
Thinking about how the west river parkway (aka, the river road), edmund boulevard, and the grassy patch in-between are all part of the threshold between neighborhood and the river gorge. In a management plan from 2002, they describe one purpose of the west river parkway:
To function as an effective transitional zone, the boulevard should retain the natural character of the Gorge but also be visually acceptable to local residents and those using the boulevard and its pedestrian trails.
from Haunts
Trail: grass
rubbed bare to
dirt, dust
sometimes groove
sometimes
rut. Houses
on one
side, leaning
oaks the
other, and
beyond the
oaks a
road to cross
before
you reach the
river.