Poet David Wagoner on the Wilderness Inside Us

Listen above or download. Running time: 7 minutes, 44 seconds.

Poet David Wagoner recites his poems, "Letting the Grass Grow Under Your Feet" and "By A Pond," and talks with Zachary Sussman about finding belonging in a landscape and letting go of anger over environmental ills.

Letting the Grass Grow Under Your Feet

It would rather not
    but of course it will.
          If you've tried standing on it
long enough, those blades
     will insist on a way out
          from under and up at last
into the light. You don't
     have to let it do that
          because it will. No matter how
stubbornly or heavily you bear down,
     something inside its cells
          doesn't believe in you
and your latent energy,
     your postponements of action,
          your useless indecision. It will grow
sideways and turn yellow or under pressure
     nearly white. It will turn
          to an almost all uprooted root for a while,
then send those blades (in spite
     of how long you stand in the way)
          up and around you.

By A Pond

Its face, as calm as the air,
holds an inverted world
of trees and a trembling sky,
and I'm looking at a garden
as far away from my eyes
as if I lay under water.

What the seers and sibyls learned
in their rippling mirrors no one
can say for sure. A dropped stone
would send it flying and show
where the earth begins again.

All I can ask for answers
from what I see in my mirror
are the shades of apple blossoms
over which water striders
lighten the touch of bees
against the mud of heaven.