Week 9: FIELD

Wang Meng, 1308-85, Scholar in a Pavilion under Trees, Cleveland Museum

Umberto Saba, The Goat

I talked to a goat.
She was alone in a pasture, and tethered.
Stuffed with grass, soaked
by the rain, she bleated.

That monotonous bleating was brother
to my sorrow. And I answered, first
in jest, then because sorrow is eternal,
has one voice and never changes.
I heard this voice in the wails
of a solitary goat.

In a goat with a Semitic face,
I heard all other pain lamenting,
all other lives.


(translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan)
____

The reading I had in mind to accompany this is John Berger's essay, "Field," in his book About Looking. I'm wondering if you can hunt it up as a pdf online... I found one, but with distracting annotations. My own copy of the book--now where is it?
_____

And in a different tone,  another poem from Peter Everwine:

Back from the Field

Peter Everwine

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or a country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.

Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads,

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws,

old ones in beards, leapers

in silk leggings, the multiple

pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.

It’s been a good day.