Borders, Boundaries, Aerial Photographs

Not having taken any such, I wrote a poem once called "Aerial Photograph." Years ago, but I still like the poem. Here it is, with several aerial photographs of a quite different landscape: the Andes at the border between Argentina and Chile, taken on a flight from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil. I was irritated when the pilot came over the loudspeaker to announce the border, waking me up (I had been up all night).  And then I was fascinated by the dry, wrinkled, not-quite-snow-covered mountains, the suggestion of roads, the possibility of habitation, but maybe not. What do the poem and the photos have to do with each other? Not much, maybe, beyond a preoccupation with landscape, and how it belongs to us, or doesn't. Or a fascination with naming, with the ways we try to fit words to the world around us, adjusting pronunciation, spelling, understanding, until we achieve some kind of congruence.

Aerial Photograph

Skin scratched red by thistles

the old orchard brush now

interpolated from an aerial map:  trees spaced so

must have been set on purpose.

The way a home site is suddenly

four survey markers and a view,

these trees bear no more fruit than elderberries

road-dusted and dripping off the stems

impossible to harvest. Ranks of purple cones

spread half a mile beyond the feeder,

that seed hung out for finches

and the orchard sinking further

into the hillside.  

Trailers and small sheds

are easily distinguished, even in the grain

of prints distilled for public use.

It's easy to count incursions, stumps

that shouldn't have been cut.

Ella's place, Bauker Hill--

old boundary names that took,

the lilac hedge patched Forest,

a flowering almond in the old front yard

really one blossomed twig against the pale shrub.

Here lives the uncle from Stober,

my grandmother says,

syntax so openly transposed

I want not to notice, or want to boast 

the proof my high school German offers--

this is where her accent lies,

not in the vowels but in the prepositions.

Or the fences. Dark indentations 

where water gathers, wire 

crossing otherwise unbroken woods--one side

is ours, and on hands and knees we grope

under rain and through a mesh

we didn't think to find. The posts

are far too new, fast question

following immediate suspicion,                                         

furtive occupation, a sliding of green

weather-treated steel a few feet south.

Like the map of certain states

shaped like limbs or articles of clothing

you can't see this place but from the air

or from a tree. Not the slow 

hazelnuts, long past production,

but from a taller fir, or the oak 

below the fence line. Like a branch 

grafted to an older trunk

this place is only what we call it.