Why I Live In the Country - John Field

I love the language of the day’s ten thousand aspects

—Mark Doty                                                          

                                                                                          

Because I wanted less of San Francisco’s              

Cold gray fog, noisy trolley cars clanking                         

Up and down steep hills, yammering

Fire trucks waking me up,

The whole damned dense

Quick essence and crazy flow

Of what city folks call real life.

No Thanks.

These days I’d rather wake up

In the Valley of the Moon,

Oh wonderful freshness of the morning air,

And carry on the serious business

Of staying alive by watching the sun

Finger-paint the hills

As if remembering them by touch.

Then take an after-breakfast stroll

Through my flower garden’s

Summer-swollen plentitude

Of variegated colors

Almost on fire with themselves.

Do I deserve all this?

I suppose I must because otherwise

I wouldn’t be here,

A perception which leads me

In the direction of empty-headedness,

A feeling something like happiness

Only better----imagine Sarah Vaughan

Nuancing My Funny Valentine just for me

On a fine midsummer afternoon,

Not a cloud or vapor trail in the sky,

Just a slight toss of leaves in the air

As I amble down rustic country roads      

Past vineyards and olive groves

So Tuscany it’s almost as if

I’m dreaming them.

Why leave? I’ve been.

Watch out! Get out of my way

Because here I come

At eighty-years-old-per-mile,

Shoes talcomed in dust,

Earth firm beneath my feet,

Thoughts soft and ripe as fallen fruit:

Figs, cumquats, plums, cashews,

A thousand oceans in a drop of dew,

The new moon’s little skullcap,

Japanese footbridge, strawberry patch,

Crepes and champagne,

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

Just to be here for a little while,

Just to be here and then adieu

Because dying is like taking a dump,

A Zen master told me, it’s what we do.

Postscript: In 1959 I spent nine months rooming in a Paris flophouse nicknamed the Beat Hotel. William Burroughs lived three doors down from me. He had just published “Naked Lunch” and was experimenting with a new way to write called the Cut-up technique. This consisted of randomly selecting and rearranging sentences and paragraphs from books, newspapers and magazines. Needless to say, the plot of his next novel got a bit confusing, but his story-line was fine if you read it when you were stoned. I used this technique when I wrote “Why I Live in the Country” by cutting up the last three poems I’d written and then pasting lines and stanzas from them together. JF