After
After
by
Robert Dana
This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s writer is Robert Dana from Coralville. For forty years Mr. Dana was the Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Cornell College in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Some of his wonderful, crisp and easily accessible books of poetry include Starting Out for the Difficult World; Yes, Everything; What I Think I Know; and his new one entitled Sumner. His poems are sparse and very tightly-woven. They go from word to word and image to image rather than from line to line or idea to idea. The tongue and your attention pauses slowly as it passes over each syllable to really feel the contours of the words in much the same way that one is aware of the physical texture of the world in the works of Séamus Heaney or Gerard Manley Hopkins. In this poem every word is linked to the one that came before in sound or idea. There are continuous small surprises, just as each surprising moment in our lives are linked to the next. In this poem, there are many kinds of languages in the world, we humans talk one way, the trees have a different kind of tongue. And aren’t we all, in a sense, part of the divine Word living now gloriously but in ignorance of what really comes after.
After
After
Ragwort. Stonecrop.
Bitterroot. Above
treeline, the slow
rocksplitters show
their tiny pink
and yellow flowers.
Give them a couple
of centuries, they’ll
break this fell to
meadow. Yesterday,
we broke our knees
here, on the heave
and pitch, upthrust
and outcrop of stone.
Today, on Fern and
Odessa, it’s chilly
in the sun, but the
walking’s easier.
Above us, wind roars
through the spruce
bearing the heavy
freight of the earth’s
breathing. Not our
human world, where so
much comes to not
enough. And not like
death. More like
what comes after after.
Up the trail knotted
hard behind me, I see
my brother-in-law;
his two, small sons;
my wife and her
sister; and further
back, and smaller
still, their parents.
Tiny figures, all
of us, in some old
Sung painting, strung
out serenely down the
sharp grade of a great,
grey-brown mountain;
understanding little
of what’s being said
by the billion-tongued
aspen, in the harsher
language of the sun.
"After After" by Robert
Dana from his book Yes, Everything published by Another Chicago Press.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Robert Dana was born in 1929, and recently retired after 40 years as Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Cornell College. Dana’s work has been awarded two national Endowment Fellowships for poetry, one in 1985 and another in 1993. He received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from New York University in 1989. His latest books are Summer and Yes, Everything which was described by one critic as "quirky in its strengths, uncompromising in its pleasures."