`Transient Magic'

Why do I find this poem so moving?

“The colors of disused railyards in winter;
the unnamed shades of iron at four o’clock;
the sun’s curiosity along abraded stones;
corrosion that mines the speckled lichen of woods;
the islands of stubbly rust on padlocked doors;
the fierce shoots of winter grass among cinders;
the fragile dim light, infused with tannin,
that falls clear on the stamped bottle glass
and regales the cast-off boot.
The colors of shale
cratered with dark rain. The rough knots
of crabgrass near the steps of the loading dock
and their sandy, scruffed umber.
The hues
of all negligible things: the nugatory blue
of slag chunks between the ties. Then, the smell
of those resinous blisters of red on the fence,
like a childhood of pines.
Such unpeopled places
luxuriate on Sundays. What was made for use
discloses in uselessness its transient magic,
assumes the radiance of the useless grasses.”

This is “Railyard in Winter,” by Eric Ormsby, from For a Modest God. Periodically, a poem or other work of art reminds us that others have shared our perceptions, even the most private, transitory and insignificant. I have always felt a pang of kinship for ignored, useless places, often home to weeds and trash. I have such a place in my backyard – the narrow corridor between the garage and the neighbors’ stockade fence. Because of the eave of the garage, the fence and the oaks in the neighbors’ backyard, the sun only briefly touches this sliver of space. The ground is paved with flagstones, covered in algae and moss. Brown leaves litter green stones.

Why should this be moving or even worthy of attention? Ormsby hints at an explanation, especially in the final four lines. “Unpeopled places” – empty places defined by absence, places we pass on the way to more important places, nevertheless redolent of the human. There’s a poignancy in places that echo with our presence but remain empty. As a reporter, I once spent a morning in the company of a field biologist (a disappearing breed) scouring a half-acre island of weeds and trees, surrounded by concrete, in Colonie, N.Y., a suburb of Albany. She identified the flora and fauna and I cataloged the trash. The story was understood by readers and editors as an environmental piece, and while I’m aware of the threats posed by litter and invasive plant species, the story for me, secretly, was more akin to poetry as Orsmby practices it. Not in form, obviously, but in intent and even in method – it was an Ormsbian catalog, tricked out with solid waste statistics and the history of purple loosestrife to make it palatable to editors and readers expecting news.

Of course, Ormsby has not given us a portfolio of photographs documenting a railyard. His language is ravishing (“nugatory blue”) and his lines are suffused with deeply meditative feeling. David Solway has written of Ormsby’s work: “The signet of his talent is an eclectic fusion of precision and prodigality, of discipline and flamboyance…” His poems recall Wallace Stevens’, in a homelier, more melancholy key.

I associate these scorned non-places with childhood memories, and that may be part of their significance for me. Most of my oldest memories are of out-of-context details – cracks in sidewalks, orange fungus on red oak trunk, the precise location of a yellow jackets’ nest one summer in the early nineteen-sixties. I also associate them with old movies and photographs. Part of the pleasure of watching, say, a Buster Keaton short is observing billboards, shops and passersby who clearly are not extras – all vanished decades ago. All glow with Ormsby’s “transient magic.” In a 1971 interview, the poet Daniel Hoffman illuminated the phenomenon I’m trying to describe:

“A real poem, any real work of art, has to be concerned with some object of feeling which is sacred – some feeling or object which the poet, or the reader, or the artist and his viewer, consider or can consider as a sacred object, as a source of numinous energies.”