THE
MAN
OF GRASS Jarold
Ramsey
©
1989
(David
Douglas 1799-1834)
I.
I was
David Douglas. I became a tree,
the fir, pseudotsuga taxifolis.
In 1825,
one of Wordworth’s children,
I plunged
through Oregon’s woods “more like a man
Flying
from something that he dreads than one
Who sought
the thing he loved.” What did I seek so long
in panic,
out of mind of Scotland? Whom Nature
loves,
like me, showing her eyes, goes far in dread—
I found
and named my specimens of grass,
trees,
vines, and ferns, like Adam
still
taking dominion in a falling world.
II.
Indians
liked me, thought me mad like them. Once
beside
Columbia I thrashed a grinning thief
and told
them all, “I’m no blanket man or boston,
know me as
the Man of Grass!” And having named
myself,
strange phylum, wherever I might wander
in that
green labyrinth the Indians greeted
me like a
comic skookum, “Grass Man! Grass Man!”
They led
me miles in search of giant pines
with nuts
like sugar, so they promised, grinning.
Even so,
limping in to camp at night, I saw
their
children run from me in terror. They were my mirror.
III.
Along the
Umpqua River in October
after a
night of wind and lightning ravaging the trees
I found at
last my Sugar Pine—Na-teel
the
Umpquas call it. Who’d believe me, munching there
on nuts as
sweet as toffee out of cones
the size
of loaves? Alone, alone, bowing
to that
grove of swaying towers, I felt
as though
turning on the pin and center of my life.
Those
great indifferent trees—how could I publish
to the
sullen world what things alive they were?
Each was
sacred quite without my worship, each
would one
day crash to earth without my witness.
Beneath
them, all I knew was punyness of knowledge,
the bitter
joy of any thinking reed.
When I
fired my piece to bring down cones
the bushes
filled with staring Indians stringing bows.
I quailed,
and ran away, and hid myself all night
in a
tangle of vines unknown to science. No one to tell.
IV.
Come day,
I headed back to Fort Vancouver.
Then
everywhere was back. I went back to Scotland
famous, to
the Royal Society, to my family:
all
nothing, dried specimens of another life.
I was good
for nothing but to find new worlds, they joked.
and sent
me out again, collecting, classifying, naming
as before,
but finding less and less beyond
the
blow-down and grizzly thickets of my mind.
Finally,
cruising the Sandwich Islands, I jumped
slow ship
to walk the slopes of Mauna Kea.
There, in
an earthen pit off-trail, a wild bull
was
trapped and battering the sides, berserk.
I leaned
over and watched and watched—
ah, that
brute energy, baffled by walls of earth until
it choked,
Nature blindly naturing, life from life,
indifference
and fury ... When I had
it all in
mind, when I’d told the suave Latin
of all my
Oregon plants, when I’d seen
the grove
of sugar pines clearly once again,
I, the Man
of Grass, blessed the bull,
and
slipped over the raw green edge, and in.
Thinking
Like a Canyon: New and Selected Poems, 1973-2010,
Antrim
House, 2012, pgs 88-90 — courtesy Jarold Ramsey
First
printed in Hand-Shadows,
Quarterly Review of Literature, 1989
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