Hoosier State Getaway

(suite of poems)

I: Eye-Level with Autumn

Take state highway 231, out of Greencastle, Indiana,

Three miles north, to county road 250 North,

With browning, head-high corn, to your left,

Soybeans ripening to a rich yellow, on your right,

And you arrive at a thirty-six acre spread —

Just a step or three

Back into early-twentieth-century America,

Where cribs and silos, filled to their brims,

Stood vigil, over farmhouses, pastures, fields, barns,

Homesteads unviolated by modernity's many devices —

Right here, in the heartland's fertile crescent,

Where people's histories, entire lives,

Are intertwined, inextricably, intimately,

With what rises up out of the soil

And even the soul worships nature's miracles.

In this peaceful isolation,

A redolence of the past lingers on the fecund air,

The wide skies punctuated by scudding clouds,

Watching over circling turkey buzzards, hooting owls,

Bounding deer, snorting pigs, lowing cows.

For two days, I've indulged in these bounties,

Savoring the soft, Septembering glow

Of late summer slowly coming home,

Toward autumnal harvest,

And having had this chance to listen, at eye-level,

To the dialogue I've heard, seen, for myself,

Between soybeans and corn,

I can tell you that all's yet well, in this rural realm,

This sanctuarial land teeming with tranquillity,

Asking only that man tend it, with gentle hands.

II: Raptured

This early-September Tuesday afternoon,

We drive the circuitous eight miles, from the farm,

To DePauw University's Nature Park,

Where, for an hour and a half,

We hike a gravel path

Rimming the precipitous cliffs of an abandoned quarry,

From which Indiana limestone was dug

To supply grist for concrete highways,

Blocks for civic buildings...

Hike under a hospitable sun, warming us

And shaping invisible thermals,

On which dozens of turkey buzzards hover,

Eyeing us, as we trudge along the trail

And look down, often, over the perilous edge,

Into the algae-green water below,

Floated with hundreds of geese and ducks.

Catching our breath, we lie on our backs,

Atop massive boulders overlooking the crater,

And gaze up at those gracefully gliding scavengers

Tilting, circling like wind devils,

Occasionally landing in the thick trees behind us,

From whose shadowy branches they stare.

Never have I been so close to such terribleness —

The sheer proximity

Of something so large, so hideous, so fearful,

Yet so beautiful that I can't look away.

Entranced by their natural black majesty,

I forget that my friends are beside me.

Suddenly, I'm rising on a thermal, flying, soaring,

Amidst the swarming primeval silence.

III: Hiking in the Wilds

Once again,

In just two and a half summer months,

The three of us descend into the umbrageous depths

Of Turkey Run State Park,

To suspend time, submit our spirits to nature's whims.

We're addicted to this vigorous activity.

Hiking through these scoured-out sandstone canyons,

Navigating the sedimentary layers of the streambed

Meandering through the base of these moss-mottled cliffs,

Reminds us, palpably, that we're alive

And that our senses have blended, to keep us balanced.

We feel the immense energy being expended

By every muscle, ligament, and tendon;

Our heaving lungs, racing hearts, pulsating arteries

Attest to the vibrancy of our flesh, bones, our essence.

We need this connection with nature,

Even more than we know or can possibly guess,

To ward off the effects of sedentariness,

The inertia that lures us into complacency,

Persuades us that civilization separates us from cave dwellers,

Entitles us to pursue, in isolation,

That urge to insulate ourselves from ourselves,

And lulls us into forgetting the primal creature

Skulking in the scoured-out canyons of our memories,

Longing to be free, again, to prowl the wilds of our animality.

09/16/08 - (2)