Wildern Green

At park’s foot the beached
   Gjøa
of Amundsen who having followed
   ice blink
   water sky
through arctic route had given sloop to city, we would meet at it or Stow Lake or columbarium or Moon Bridge or many a time the arboretum an old-world garden within the park, to her joy
   eine Linde
white linden tree imported like everyone everything awaiting huge on main-lawn rim, but farther in toward mulch end of tiny atascadero where salvia made aroma next to our shade, I was young and oft wore hippie vizard had donned a tatty-sportcoat mailboy one to work in money district where she happened to, German married pretty almost young, find with her a love that had to thrive on Saturday morning, even a
   Dichterfrau
poet’s woman or the very
   Waldfrau
dryad had to leave the noonlight park to join a mate at home, was not a
   sex woman
anyway she told me which did not hinder a love that fed on poems I brought who had read the language been a recent winter while in Munich Würzburg Rhineland knew what to seek at library and in the office I would jot a line to her from Karl Krolow
   sie flieht vorüber, in sich gekehrt
that made me think of her a working-woman goddess in preoccupied flight, or Thomas Bernhard
   das Jahr ist wie das Jahr vor tausend Jahren
that sang of half-dead country men gone medieval, or Hans Magnus Enzensberger
   lass mich heut nacht in der gitarre schlafen
that put the love we had to a crooked sleep-tune, I had seen them all in a new anthology and other I did not quote the work of Wilhelm Lehmann a name I meant to return to the two poems
   Auf sommerlichem Friedhof
   Oberon
what had been written of him in introduction having caught at me, for now we met at great bronzen one in Japanese teagarden and it was only spring were flowers in his hand that children had laid there we wanted to think would begin in moment’s afternoon making poems each alone to the other, to exchange at office where she would type them send them back as confidential memo every intimate word in defiance of the ub ub ubub hubbub hubbaboo ballyhoo hullabaloo with which the manic charming city tried to drown the air even in park, hosing it out of moving speaker diesel breath
   is a modern bus the kind of modern bus that San Francisco needs and
   San Francisco deserves
on hippie hill de Young Museum alike yet not much penetrated thick disciplined foliage of arboretum to our
   heimlich
secret nookery that I a tumid potrero a toucher now del pecho de la white woman from Masuria had sought, having known immense but tamed monotony of the
   Great American
   Öde
desert plain I had wanted garden a fragrant contriven walled presidio to shut out trade racket the words of youth on move, a beauty that did not sprawl had met one here with her and in the anthology two poems I had not quoted an introductory hint of what had looked at me out of meadow the trim main lawn perhaps that nodded to the love I felt yet seemed beyond, the
   Tag ist süss und ladet ein
invitation to enter green expanse rhymed neat with other line, I had come to reject such, nor Williams nor Snyder did it, along with any
   belief in an inherently meaningful reality
that was
   reflected in traditional poetic forms
as man introducing anthology Victor Lange had written of some few of the Germans that had worked on into splintered unmeaningful time, but could see in Lehmann that rhyme did not vend convention sentimentality or hide uninventiveness, no
   Nur ein Klirren
   Wie von goldnen Reitgeschirren
   Bleibt,
   Wenn der Wind die Häferkorner reibt
showed deft word musician at play who avoided the mere atmospheric, while indeed it
   reflected
a
   belief
in
   meaningful reality
the
   apostrophe of nature as a realm of meaning
that transcended in a manner the
   business of everyday living
was the one reality to him, and I knew that my own intolerant generation had room in heart for rhymers it agreed with, say a record ardiz from Hibbing Minnesota the look the quirks of Lee Harvey Oswald who could set
   bark
to
   dark
like James Whitcomb Riley whatever he wanted if done in neoapocalyptic vein, toward noon would hear the hoarse clang drum-driven rhymes of Moby Grape or Big Brother and the Holding Company metro din that enfiladed east park, write
   beware of the dispossessed
   the irate balding young
   with their dreams and pounding-sticks
when I got to room on Church and Duncan fearing myself in them the dirt the violence my younger mind that city magnified, I needed shelter, took it in word garden a poetry for which mere naming
   of natural objects, of birds, stones, and flowers
was an
   act of poetic evocation, conveying a truth somewhere between natural
   science and magic
I read in Lange’s introduction, Wilhelm Lehmann had found in nature
   an inexhaustible arsenal of animals and plants, of images, fragrances,
   associations, and impressions
that linked man
   to a demonic nether world
of
   salamanders, vultures, hedge sparrows, grasshoppers, yellowhammers,
   swallowwort, poplar blossoms, aconite, darnel, and pimpernel, an
   astounding assortment of creatures and botanical specimens
to Lange suggested a
   nature handbook rather than any immediacy of experience
a world that man wanted to sink to from which he could
   in any case seldom escape
but I did not whiff the demonic in it except old Latin sense nor did I get the nether, Lehmann a nonsubterranean poet to me, when Lange turned to
   the success
of the
   Naturlyriker
nature poet
   the term is an ambiguous and misleading one
that he attributed to a
   refusal to indulge either in bucolic genre sketches or in pseudometaphysical
   effusiveness
and noted not
   sentimentality but a high degree of artifice
in their work, I was caught again but had meager two poems to look at, even so with lines that gave and held almost enough
   Durch den warmen Lehm geschnitten
   Zieht der Weg
to keep me, in arboretum I did not read him to loved one who favored Rilke Günter Eich as in our latening radiant time we hid by
   Gjøa
to make sex then both skipped work for a
   lifelong afternoon
I would write, at Church and Duncan, I hunted the oeuvre on my own to learn that except a poem or few no one had translated Lehmann the botany zoology compression wit too hard to set over I thought whose German did not run too well, might have thrown me into the job an important one had I been schoolish, he needed reading a mind that had seen full everything in nature with
   Menschen als Wesen unter Wesen, nicht ihr Vormund
man creature among creatures not their guardian yet doing what none other could when foliage had gotten so ripe that it seemed to want to talk
   ich nehme ihm sein Schweigen ab
man poet relieving it of its silence in trying to rhyme the unrhymed world, had announced
   eine Revolution von der Einsamkeit, vom Einsamen her
revolution to come of solitude by the solitary, no news connotation, no hippie judeochristian hortative, and left me a green cabbala to live on no matter what in the moment I did the moment’s evening phone call now when love took its death cut, she had
   chosen
but I did not feel it as such would take thirty years to bleed out a period when each would not see other nor often have an address to write to, she mistaking too I think a continued mutual reverence for what had died I would learn in the year of Lehmann’s death, dreaming like me a transcendent reunion to close the wound of a choice she had only been made to make, memory of arboretum green god that had nodded from meadow the words we had read kept live bound up in sound of her German until at many years’ end I went to her an older mystic teaching woman in rain city married to faith not man and we knew it, did not blame other, knew it all that weekend shying around the remains which no did not include the
   heidnischer Naturlyriker Naturmagier
heathenish nature poet magician whose work had had not everything to do with our love and that I had begun to read in park time needed interpretive aid of young academic
   David Scrase
whose
   Wilhelm Lehmann
paper I came on in
   Essays in Contemporary German Literature
the year when Norway reclaimed the Amundsen sloop that city had not maintained and I left San Francisco with not on the
   Gjøa
would reread it along my many miles with more written matter they took me to the work the man as well the rigid passionate neophyte north German
   Philolog
who had studied awhile in Berlin met
   Moritz Heimann
   E. R. Weiss
   Oskar Loerke
   Martin Buber
   Walter Rathenau
   Emil Orlik
   Julius Levin
   Hans Kyser
   Eduard Stucken
   Gerhard Hauptmann
   Emil Strauss
of socalled
   Donnerstag Gesellschaft
Thursday Club that gathered at Steinerts Weinstube
   Kurfürstindamm und Joachimstrasse
I did not know every name but the few I did let me conjure an oaken smoky lamplit room with educated chortle Wilhelmian cravats the wine talk rich in wording that inkled Weimar Republic, where he found a guide the literary
   Moritz Heimann
and
   Oskar Loerke
friend poet his own age but he moved home was teaching could meet him only in exmas vacation too young on leash that mother-mate jerked a proctress Wilhelmian world, my own humiliant recent role, married kid wanted to write but acted the husband worker whom woman America yanked in line would not let visit a writing friend except at holiday slack, the Lehmann pupa stage included the fiction a story
   Michael Lippstock
so image-thick that wry kind Heimann had to ridicule, whereat
   his work took on an increasingly conservative tone and found fewer and
   fewer readers and finally no publisher—it was almost as if, stripped of
   all its adventurous imagery
his fiction wrote Scrase had gone anemic, it had been winnowed to German equivalent
   Reader’s Digest
   The New Yorker
style of that day, the time in uniform its willed end a walk to captivity, and the decades’ work in Celtic Anglo Saxon a byplay with old and modern poetry in English a
   gegenständliche
objectual tongue that he would devote to, Lehmann went imago toward quiet middle age in
   Bukolisches Tagebuch
country journal a statement of what who he had done been was and now saw in
   green solitude
round Eckernförde Baltic port the taut sharp cuckoo-haunted lyrics acoming
   Myrddin Merlinus
Arthurian gift the creative impellent in nature his imagery come home, a revolution of
   solitude
by a solitary who did not have much reputation left to guard, seemed to want it need it that way, outlasted manmade cataclysm on walking watch neath
   freiem Himmel
open sky where poems originated to achieve fame mid the rubble the damned half dead in it turning now to an
   esoteric priest of the green god, a tireless conjurer of the panic and
   chthonic powers
who tried
   to distill human experience from the play and counterplay of natural
   forces
did not view man in
   terms of his social relations, his metaphysical or religious attributes
to whom nature was
   world
and time
   season
in that they craved the touch of his wand knew nothing else would manumit return them at least to the
   rustling vegetation of reality
they had deafened to in Nazi ub ub ubub hubbub hubbuboo ballyhoo hullabaloo language era the worse bombardment that followed, needing a pagan humanism that excluded
   all abstractions and ideologies
any notion of
   fate
or
   guilt
to rather keep eye on
   fox, eel, red thrush, mole, grub, sheep, and goat
in nonjudeochristian mythic mode, evoke
   a merlinesque shuddering
among those who had most forgotten
   Sichtbare Zeit
visibility of time in
   acorn, chestnut
samara, wanting to hear again or at last a nonangelic Orfeo that dwelt and flew with
   denizens of the wild
I took these admiring words of
   Hans Egon Holthusen
   Günther Busch
   Karl Krolow
   Helen Adolf
along on my way had never quite known what it was about Lehmann that meant such world to me, I might have divined it in a Jungian von Franz I read on San Miguel de Allende mandarino garden rooftop her notion that if
   an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with
   the anima or animus problem so that he or she is no longer partially
   identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant
   character and appears in a new symbolic form, representing the
   self, the innermost nucleus of the psyche
which for a man
   manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian, a wise old man,
   a spirit of nature
have come aware that what I saw in him he had found in sylvestrian Merlin the green god, been ready to put to word the meaning bloomy ditch or swatch of tree-claim shelterbelt had held in prairie childhood that knew where evening was and I would age to renew it in redwood grove or among ponderosas mountain time, he too had inhaled an
   Einsamkeit und Weite
solitude and breadth in the great German fen country had walked one haven patch to end of his life an olden honored misfit man that in
   the true poet can be singled out by his close connection with natural
   phenomena and his belief in the power of language
had defined own achievement having written in cranky rejection of anyone less who drunk on
   sewage of civilization, politics, technology, commerce
polluted the
   language and the intellect
he returned to
   das All
the everything what something
   Etwas
he had been, a pagan death in the season I had noted a move over trim main lawn of arboretum, I rode the great plain of my life to derelict farmstead Minnesota an apartment in Saint Paul where I wrote
   I am a poet far from home
   And so I’ll go up to the tower
   And following the way of leaves
   I’ll come back down again
did not think to put or find any Lehmann in it whom I read reread and had to admit that the heart of his work the poems did not translate even a schooler would mangle, to
   yellow had no name no form
   and someone called it butterfly
the Columbia Gorge what I had seen through moving window, to Petaluma ranch an eden retreat the weather the botany mediterrane where
   the eucalyptus waves
   in operatic light
   a picket crow surmounting
   its grey-green height
I wrote in spirit of Lehmann the rhymer whom I wanted to write about could not very well when no one had read him in English had to take my word, maybe a clue to translation a footnote to original poem would do, I tried but set me to other work the
   Oskar Loerke
   Porträt eines lyrikers
not hard to thin to American yet an academic might have done better the prose not quite so vulnerable to tweak have gotten a nuance a meaning I had to have missed, to Fargo in north home tract I had married again to edit onehanded a magazine in which I published
   Vom lyrischen Gedicht
   On Lyric Poetry
translation I had begged of Johannes Vazulik, got
   Bewegliche ordnung
   Moving Order
that Scrase had done into the
   Plains Poetry Journal
which I had helped start, my own attempt
   Oskar Loerke
going to South Dakota journal, were only aperitif I thought would catch an eye attract translation, and to Mogollon highland Arizona where I withdrew to the private walked and watched on giant wooded lava rock took in the
   strömendes Licht, wie geseiht,
   weisser Septemberschimmer
streaming filtered light white gleam of September that he would have enjoyed the country had stayed so wild have seen the green god in katsina maybe, I read the whole of
   Bukolisches Tagebuch
in a joy my own, I wanted to know how Lehmann work would assort with American socalled
   nature writing
the epitomic
   Thoreau
   Leopold
   Abbey
   Snyder
with the radical active
   Earth First! movement
now, reviewed
   Wilhelm Lehmann
   A Critical Biography
volume one by David Scrase in literary magazine a main outgrowth of onetime
   counterculture
how readers tuned to
   Cummings
   Roethke
   O’Hara
   Rexroth
   Duncan
   Merwin
would take to Lehmann poetics a thema universal in but European way, they would like such minded visuality were used to franco attitude the notion of poet at an easel in bohème the Cézanne magic method
   Gertrude Stein
who knew not Lehmann from Eve had applied to written word the
   idea that in composition one thing is as important as another thing. Each
   part is as important as the whole
even also
   Cézanne’s conviction that nature in its plain actuality is always abhorrent
   and that its ingredients must be reduced
or enchanced
   to their true function as metaphors of feeling
in painted or written still life Victor Lange’s remark on modern
   Naturlyrik
so my review compared him to
   Robinson Jeffers
who might not have undertaken an
   almost systematic nature philosophy
as Lehmann had but yea with
   inhumanism
had verily chucked old mono god for the elder green, I would have continued but had not had room or right the oeuvre untranslated weighed on me, I owe the
   poeta pittore
as Heimann dubbed him young and do what I can have woven him into my work let out the name kept eye on socalled
   worldwide web
for any mention and now see that
   Sean Haldane
Northern Irish my age has
   put up
a few translations at
   www.poem.sh/translations.htm
along with account of visit to Eckernförde the Lehmann home garden in broad sense not that he worked one in the narrow no
   kleindenkende
middle classer, he even claimed that
   Gärtnerei erfordert so viel physische Anstrengung, dass ein Dichter
   dem kaum gewachsen sein könnte
advising poet not take a gardening job it demanded too much of the body, Lehmann a watching walking
   Wesen
anyhow, a wildern mind, in not too long main writing days of me will end and I shall be an aged human edition of the vine god ready to chant
   So lass uns weiter fliehn
   Mit runden Schulterknochen
   Wie Eichelhäher ziehn
with him and maybe find
   let us go on running away
   with rounded shoulders like the jay
right American words for it