"Lastness" by Galway Kinnell : The Poetry Foundation

Lastness by Galway Kinnell : The Poetry Foundation

“If you can’t catch the bird flying at you, don’t bother getting him at all.”  I’m sure there’s a purist photographer out there somewhere who would say that, but I’ve decided I’m lucky to have caught these Canada Geese in any fashion.  I’m even telling myself that there’s something interesting in the attitude of the flying pair contrasted to their floating cousin. Neither group is interested in me; it’s all about my appreciation of them, heedless birds in a green world.

As for poems, I was looking for something about a mockingbird to connect to yesterday’s little frolic. What I came across instead is my first experience with Galway Kinnell’s poem, “Lastness.”  It’s an unlikely comparison of a bear and a newborn son, both negotiating the world in which they find themselves, both with their black, glistening mammalian hair—and all that compared, in turn,  to the grasslands and ferns of a newborn planet. It feels a little like my appreciation of the geese—unlikely, beyond logic, and stunning for the human observer.  

I’m sure one could argue that Kinnell’s conceit is too much, a bridge too far in stretching figurative language and in thinking about the likenesses among dissimilar entities.  For now, however, I’m good with it, happy to be shocked again by what the human mind is able and lucky enough to stumble onto, perceive, and guess about. If validity is a question, it seems a job for some ill-tempered cousin from the wrong side of the tracks.

I’m interested too in the way Kinnell’s animal steps out of himself in the first stanza. About both bear and human speaker, we can ask who is seeing what, and how, and on whose terms? By what unconscious way of perceiving?  Is it trickery? Magic? Mysticism?

Thanks again to The Poetry Foundation for discovering these poems before I did and offering them to us all. In case I don’t get to it soon, another poem somewhat along these lines is Meghan O’Rourke’s “Inventing a Horse.” The voice and language are nothing like Kinnell’s, but both poems intrigue me as they find themselves wondering about the mind of an animal, much in the vein of the movie Buck, which was discussed here on July 16.

 

Inventing a Horse by Meghan O'Rourke : The Poetry Foundation

Lastness by Galway Kinnell : The Poetry Foundation

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