`A Dome of Kindness'

I woke earlier than usual Wednesday morning. The kids were sleeping and my wife had already left for the gym. I sat on the couch with the first cup of coffee, cat on my shoulder, feeling unusually bright-eyed, and opened Guy Davenport’s The Cardiff Team to the title story:

“If it happens that Nature, when we get up one morning and start our day, hands us exactly what we were of a mind to do, our praise comes readily, and the world looks like a meadow in the first week of creation, green, fresh, and rich in flowers.”

Lovely, like a posthumous imprimatur stamped on my day by the author. Out the window I saw buttercups and ivy in the yard and firs and aspens across the street, swaying in the breeze. Davenport’s blessing held. Later in the morning, I walked a block in downtown Bellevue lined with sycamores, scabby-trunked trees signifying city life. They thrive, like us, in noise and filth, and as their bark flakes off the flawless under-bark invites graffiti. Among sycamores, psoriasis is a symptom of growth and good health. James Schuyler, a city man, never pretended to be a naturalist but was good at minute observations of the natural world. In “Hymn to Life” he writes:

“`I need you,’ tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall
And crooked branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget:
Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen
Years or days or hours ago.”

Already buoyed by urban greenery, I turned the corner and walked along a line of straight-trunked tulip trees, their hand-shaped leaves dappling sunlight on the sidewalk. Even errands no longer seemed odious. A rather full empty lot bloomed with dandelions, knapweed and a tall, spindly cousin of dandelion, the name of which I don’t know. Schuyler again:

“I hate fussing with nature and would like the world to be
All weeds. I see it from the train, citybound, how the yuccas and chicory
Thrive. So much messing about, why not leave the world alone? Then
There would be no books, which is not to be borne. Willa Cather alone is worth
The price of admission to the horrors of civilization. Let’s make a list.”

And I did, mentally, for the rest of the day. On the list went Louis MacNeice, whose Collected Poems I’ve been rereading. At dusk I thought about “Evening in Connecticut,” written in the terrible fall of 1940. It begins:

“Equipoise: becalmed
Trees, a dome of kindness;
Only the scissory noise of the grasshoppers;
Only the shadows longer and longer.”