Letter to Barnwood from Siv Cedering

While riding “United #167, 39,000 feet above sea level, somewhere over Nebraska,” Siv Cedering penned a letter to Thom Tammaro about his Barnwood book consisting of an interview and poems by William Stafford. Believing that our readers would enjoy parts of her letter, we obtained her permission to publish these excerpts.

I have just finished lunch, accompanied by the forward and conversation in Roving Across Fields. It is such good company; rather, it is a good space to enter.

I think of a good poem, a good book, as a space I can enter. Other things can be such spaces. Outside my bedroom window there is a white birch. Every morning when I am home I sit in bed and look at that birch tree, and my waking consciousness comes back to me while I am still afloat in that nebulous space, undefinable and all inclusive. The bedroom wall is white, the lace curtains are white, the trunk of the birch tree is white with characteristic markings, and the still bare twigs are dark, and of late filled with collections of drops, each of which holds its own view of the world. Through this view through that window I, in turn, am in some absolute interrelationship with that outside world.

That window, then, is like a good poem or a good book. It is as much of the concrete and specific as any mind needs to hold on to, and at the same time as little as the same mind needs for it to float freely. It is the poem, the tao, the Biblical “way,” the Greek “topic,” the “body,” that the spirit needs.

Sometimes I think in terms of creating such space, in a poem, in a novel, in a room, in a garden, even in conversation, creating a space where someone else’s spirit can enter. Although I create egocentrically, out of my life and world around me, I am at the same time conscious of creating such a space, and I am grateful, somewhat perplexed, and very pleased when I am told in so many words that one of my poems or novels has led a reader into a space where he can come to some recognition, a reinterpretation of some experience of his, or a verbalization of some previously unexpressed feeling or thought. In Roving Across Fields you are, I think, creating such space. You and Bill together, and I roam with you. I remember when I first came across Bill Stafford’s poems. They were like friends’ hands on my shoulders saying, “it’s all right, kid, go ahead, write that kind of poem.” I had written poems like “Raccoon” and “Night in the Adirondacks,” and when I met Bill’s poems they were mirrors where I could recognize myself, askance. Oh, I’m not saying my poems were as good as his. No, I’m talking about kinship, the recognition of spirit embodied in language touching the world around tenuously, but with the sense of touch, to both feel (feel to know) and to communicate, to say, “I see, I hear, I acknowledge” (at the same time saying, “What is this?”).

Around that time I wrote a poem for Stafford, which appeared in The new York Times in 1969. I had forgotten about it until last fall at a reading im Manhattan when someone in the audience stood up and asked for it and then proceeded to recite it. It goes like this:

SUNDAY TRAVELER

For Bill Stafford

There are places we must go to
without direction,
like Sunday travelers.

And I am a skier who stops
stunned, for blood is never more red
than it is here, spreading on snow.

The tracks of whatever made it
trail through that white,
and I do not follow to known

if it was animal hurting animal,
or hunter calling for blood.
Instead I stand among pines

Thinking: Maybe it takes a stranger
to bring us home
to places we know as well as

that ditch we jumped over,
found flowers in, or sailed
barkboats on when it was river,

in spring, thinking I should say:
Stranger,
it is easier to recognize red

when it is spreading on your show,
as it is easier to name the animal that runs
through someone else’s dream.

I wanted to write it down for you as part of this somewhat one-sided dialogue.

I consider letters and most of my poems dialogues. I hope they are birch trees in the window. Although I am thousands of miles from home (and going further) and thousands of feet from the earth, the touching in that nebulous space continues and is a way for the soul to gather itself from the branchwork and whatever tokens and trace the weather is leaving.

It seems like we’re getting ready to land. Nice talking to you. Thank you for Roving Across Fields, a space I’ll rove through again.

---

Ovid

Who has not been exiled
From some civilization
To be forced to live
With the Barbarians
To then be resigned
That civilization
Is only a construction
In the mind
And language simply a convenient tool
Used when planning the hunt
Or commenting on the direction
Of the wind?

And yet,
When the years have passed
And your hearing is impaired
And your eyes almost blind,
You, the trusted prisoner,
Walk out of the encampment,
To go, simply to go,
Toward that place in the mind,
Knowing that no cities will rise
Out of the sea of rushes,
And no poets will expound
On the meaning of a line,
Or explain the ways of the gods.

And as an old man,
Finally sees he has been
The brunt of a joke,
You stop, scratch your head,
And laugh. To wind and marsh
You declare: "When I was exiled
From civilization, I thought I was
Exiled from civilization!"

And then,
When you finally begin to understand
How the Barbarian body
Accepts the civilization in the mind,
You trip
Over a tuft, or slip
In the brackish water of a puddle.
You can't get up. But
It's all right.

You have let your aging body expand
Because you wanted to include
Everything. Now it refuses
To heed your command.
The weakness of the flesh can pass
As an excuse.
Again, you become resigned.
But if there is a joke,
It is on the gods, or time.
For you have your talisman
From the wilderness,
And the old dreams,
Recognized as dreams.

The world without has already lost
Its clear sounds and sharp delineations,
So your visions are intact,
And will remain
When the heron
Lays an egg in the ear
That held your hearing
And the eye of a black bird will spy
A grey hair she can twist
Into a nest.

Siv Cedering

---

Nailing Up the Mezuzah

A friend from Greece
brought a tin house
on a plaque, designed
to protect our abode,
as in Greek churches
embossed legs or hearts
on display entreat aid.
I hung it but now
nail my own proper charm.

I refuse no offers of help,
at least from friends,
yet this presence
is long overdue. Mostly
we nurture our own
blessings or spoil them,
build firmly or undermine
our walls. Who are termites
but our obsessions gnawing?

Still the winds blow hard
from the cave of the sea
carrying off what they will.
Our smaller luck abides
like a worm snug in an apple
who does not comprehend
the shivering of the leaves
as the ax bites hard
in the smooth trunk

We need all help proffered
by benign forces. Outside
we commit our beans to the earth,
the tomato plants started
in February to the care
of the rain. My little
pregnant grey cat offers
the taut bow of her belly
to the sun's hot tongue.

Saturday I watched alewives
swarm in thier thousands
waiting in queues quivering
pointed against the white
rush of the torrents
to try their leaps upstream.
The gulls bald as coffin
nails stabbed them casually
conversing in shrieks, picnicking.

On its earth, this house
is oriented. We grow
from our bed rooted firmly
as an old willow into the water
of our dreams flowing deep
in the hillside. This hill
is my temple, my soul.
Malach hamoves, angel of death
pass over, pass on.

Marge Piercy

"Nailing Up the Mezuzah" may be found in My Mother's Body (Knopf, 1985) and The Art Of Blessing the Day (Knopf, 1999).

---

Blue Herons

Fond of each other,
I think if they did not exist

They should have to be imagined
By someone watching young girls

Dancing on hardwood floors.
It would be in China or France

And the trees would just
That morning have begun to lose

Their first, shivery petals.
It would take an old man,

I think, to see in the limbs
Of the dancers the blue skins

Of streets he passed through
Every day of his life,

And how on this one
They were covered with tiny

Soft flames. Only then could
He see the sides of the dancers

Lifting into the spandrel
And truss of wings,

Or the ways they moved before him
In concert from the barre.

Robert Gibb

---

Absolution

Donald W. Baker

---

To One Sleeping

Soaking up the moonlight--
surely inside your body
must be silver lakes and rivers.
If you talked in your sleep,
you would speak amazing light
until morning.

Grace Butcher