~This poem was previously published in Nightsun (2007).
~Selected by Clara Jane Hallar, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
Never Enough
Time
after Seamus Heaney
Therefore
don’t drive across Arkansas on the Interstate
but take one
of the small meandering two-lanes
through the
Ozarks. Park your car once in a while
and step out
into the persistent deciduous forest.
Breathe in
the wild mint and sassafras, notice
the way the
sky’s blue seems bluer against
all that
green. And when one of the small
old towns
slows you down to twenty-five or thirty,
let the
middle-aged woman smiling at the pump
save you any
trouble. Answer her sister at the register
who’ll ask
where you’re headed, where you’re from.
And if you
happen into Stone County, please come
to my house,
any local will give you directions,
though
you’ll have to climb the last half-mile
up the rocky
hill by foot. Knock on the unlocked door
or go out
back, find me weeding beans or tomatoes.
After a
stroll through the garden, I’ll make us some tea.
And together
we’ll pass at least a couple of hours.
You can
afford them. Do you truly believe
you have
anyplace better to go?
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE POEM
One day in 2007 on my daily morning walk through the Ozark
woods that surround the house my then-husband and I built there 30 years
before, I thought of Seamus Heaney’s marvelous poem, “Postscript,” which
closes his 1996 collection, The Spirit
Level, and honors County Clare, Ireland, where the poet lived. When I
returned from my ritual walk, and with Heaney’s poem in mind, I sat at my desk
and drafted my own love poem for the Ozark Mountains and the 52 acres of woods
in Stone County, Arkansas, where I lived from the age of 30 and would continue
to live for the next 34 years.
*****
ABOUT ANDREA HOLLANDER
Andrea Hollander is the author of four full-length poetry
collections, most recently Landscape with
Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012, finalist for the Oregon
Book Award. Her many other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (prose and
poetry), the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and
two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, after
living in the Ozark woods of Arkansas for 35 years, Hollander moved to
Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing workshops at two literary centers.
Her website is andreahollander.net.
Gorgeous.
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