RIBS, A TROUT AND A LILY
by Willam Johnson
The making of a poem can be reckless and unpredictable, a groping after voice and form. “Cathedral” was a long time coming, and, I now think, will never be complete. Officially, it began on a backpacking trip I took with my two sons. Memory says we fished into evening at a mountain lake. In rain the boys hiked to camp without me. Worn out as darkness fell, I carried a rod, pack and lunker trout after them. When I rested under a cedar, something stirred in me. It was a presentiment, held by rain, lightfall, the woods and a growing awareness they bore me.
My sons appeared in early drafts, and I strove to keep them in. They remain as an invisible breath. One image became central: a rib-cage that lay near the trail. As I worked on the poem, I began to feel these bones had waited a long time for me. In near-dark I couldn’t see them clearly, but rain soaked the woods with expectation.
And dread arose—over the trout, whose life I had taken, the bones themselves, and my feeling “parched and bitter” and alone. If fear has an object, dread is faceless, an encounter with pure nothingness. Out of it floated a solitary lily. It grew in the bone-house where it tipped spilling rain. If “Cathedral” has a sanctuary, it harbors not only a flower, but the ineffable mystery of being here.
Over time the poem became less narrative (‘what happened’) and more lyrical (‘what it felt like’). A lily—floral Persephone?—sprouted in the house of death—well-spring of lives and poems. Even this draft only scrapes the surface rain washes away. If poetry bears a felt change of consciousness (Owen Barfield’s phrase), then “Cathedral” houses indwelling life, as a kinship with death.
The poem’s last line came as a shock. The power of dread, I now see, came to include our ecological crisis, which was less apparent to me in the early life of the poem. That rainy hike now traverses a planet on fire. How nourishing those raindrops have become. The ribs, elk perhaps, offered me a gift both beautiful and uncanny.
The forces that would make our earth, and us, dead, inert things, are tenacious. Our call is to nurture not things, but images, the lilies within and without us. The difference between an image and a thing is that a thing is drained of life, while an image bears it within, where it can be shared. In a cage of bones, a lily tips, spilling rain.