Sherry Chandler

Here’s the opening passage from Kenneth Rexroth’s American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (The Seabury Press, 1973):

The long-term tendencies in American poetry reflect the major influences that went to form the culture as a whole and these in turn the ethnic and national groups who have made up the American people.

First in point of time of course was the American Indian, and the Indian endures as subtle, all-pervasive background, both in vestiges of Indian cultural contributions in a positive sense, and in reverse, as the sense of guilt which haunts American history. At no time except at the very beginning has there not been somewhere, on the part of some poet, an attempt to incorporate directly the Indian heritage. Equally important to the traditionally raised children of older families, the Indians took the places of the deities of earth and air, of springs and trees and mountains. They were the satyrs and nymphs of the American child, his connection with the earth beneath his feet. People reared in our contemporary society of urban nomads, broken families, computerized education, and televised leisure can form no conception of the role played by tales of the American Indian in the older, more stable society.

Photograph by T. R. Williams

Snow in the Suburbs

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a lower twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

—Thomas Hardy

I realize the photograph is completely antithetical to the poem, which was featured on Writers Almanac a month or so back. These two — Baxter & Peanut — have never been wide-eyed and thin in their decade plus of life. Well, wide-eyed maybe. A cat has no choice about that. They will sometimes go out an play in the snow.

Maybe Peanut’s snowy undercoat can stand in for the snow storm. His mother was supposed to be a barn cat but I have long-since given up any illusion that such a critter can exist on our place. Baxter was born in the linen closet.

We did take in a black cat a couple of years ago. Bertie. He’s featured here regularly. He was not ever wide-eyed and thin. He’s built on a wide frame.