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  • The Landscape of Poetry
  • Timothy Riordan (bio)

Trucking For Lycidas

  Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade   And strictly meditate the thankless Muse.

—John Milton, “Lycidas” (1638)

To save the world, a friend hauls his sculpture in a pickup and tells me, You don’t need a truck to write a poem. He doesn’t know that I’m trucking for Lycidas and need to navigate a warming countryside of poetry, cut off from Nature that used to be.

How poetry forgets itself, and itself has been forgotten despite workshop revivals. Shepherd no longer plays the pipes but listens on his iPod to Greenland melting, while gunning his atv at roundup (oblivious to horse in barn). The only shepherds I’ve seen tending flock are in pastoral

paintings, like the one that hung above the mantel in childhood, where I would stare at a scene of rolling fields— man instructing boy to stand guard and watch over the flock, no wolf in sight. Far hills awash in light diffused— a cottage here and there, swirls of smoke from chimneys

(the whole cliché), idyllic landscape worthy of pillaging. I still believe in the poet’s trade, playing the pipes with time not beating down, sheep not lured by wolf. But dreams are lost with the ice cap diminishing, sea levels rising, shoreline eroding, no place to contemplate wetlands. [End Page 48]

How many times to warn of disaster: a shrinking habitat of helpless prey and people still don’t believe— I am the wolf! Sure! Sure!—while shepherd moans as one by one his sheep disappear. So much folklore: allusions to Pan, shaggy-legged goat boy, dancing in fields.

Then, at night by a fire, peasants drinking in village tavern to drown out the bucolic life. Blind-eyed Milton knew the cause was lost—the poet in retreat, his Lycidas drowned. For such is the life of art: to believe in its creation though the world be hell-bent on destruction.

And as landscape is bulldozed to suburban sprawl, I whisper while all disappears; I shout while all falls down. I cannot have my way with verbal constructions where analog loses in a digital world. I contemplate a hillside to keep it from sliding,

I disappear in meditation to save the ocean, I write a poem to salvage the species. Lycidas knew that life is tenuous and no gps could save him at sea. [End Page 49]

Biography of the World

When asked what I was doing, I replied I was working on a biography of the world as I’ve seen it from day one. I think it is interesting and have nothing more to say about it, except that when I got up today I felt the ball of earth roll in through my window and place itself at my feet.

The sun turned up a notch or two, the volume steady, as things weren’t shimmering or shaking—no earthquake here— but something of significance made itself felt, though the power of words weakened to a minimum in acuity and description. No pandering or giving over to vocabulary,

no sensibility or rhythm, no feel for the magnitude of my bragging, my laying claim of earth-shattering goings-on inside the room; or that I could boast of taking on the whole of the world, writing its story all at once—a truth to tell being here and recognizing what was placed in front of me by circumstance—

no decoys, just the real thing and the question whether I was big enough, bold enough to accept the momentum of the occasion. To tell what I heard, to go to the shoals and depths, to imagine no more than was there, and no less than it is. [End Page 50]

Timothy Riordan

Timothy Riordan’s poems have appeared in such periodicals as the North American Review, Envoi (UK), the Cincinnati Poetry Review, the Journal of Kentucky Studies, the Santa Fe Literary Review, and the New Review. He has published four collections of poems.

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