- A Favorite
Poet Alastair Reid was a friend of my Uncle Willard’s and, in 1979 or ’80, he came to Oysterville for a visit. During his stay, we walked to my property on the bay where my house was in the process of being built. Along my drive, we looked at the zillion little shoots of gorse that were coming up along the sandy verges.
“I’ve heard that our gorse came originally from your Scotland,” I said. “Here it’s a plague. Is it out of control there, as well?”
“Not at all,” he insisted. And went on to describe how they go around zapping sprouts of gorse with “small blowtorches.” I’ve sometimes wondered how the county would feel about that eradication method for noxious weed control!
As the years go by and age begins to take its toll, I often think of Alastair and of his poem “Weathering”– one of my all-time favorites – from his book by the same name. I don’t think he’d mind my sharing it here.
Weathering
I am old enough now for a tree
once planted, knee high, to have grown to be
twenty times me,
and to have seen babies marry, and heroes grow deaf –
but that’s enough meaning-of-life.
It’s living through time we ought to be connoisseurs of.
From wearing a face all this time, I am made aware
of the maps faces are, of the inside wear and tear.
I take to faces that have come far.
In my father’s carved face, the bright eye
he sometimes would look out of seeing a long way
through all the tree-rings of his history.
I am awed by how things weather: an oak mantel
in the house in Spain, fingered to a sheen,
the marks of hands leaned into the lintel,
the tokens in the drawer I sometimes touch –
a crystal lived-in on a trip, the watch
my father’s wrist wore to a thin gold sandwich.
It is an equilibrium
which breasts the cresting seasons but still stays calm
and keeps warm. It deserves a good name.
Weathering. Patina, gloss, and whorl.
The trunk of the almond tree, gnarled but still fruitful.
Weathering is what I would like to do well.
What a great poem! Wouldn’t we all like to “weather well”!! Thanks for sharing.