“After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs“, from Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, by Jean Garrigue (1973)

After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs

She was the one who lived up country
Half in the woods on a rain-washed road
With a well not near and a barn too far
And the fields ledgy and full of stones
That the crows cawed over and liked to walk in
And the hill and the hollow thick with fern
And in the swamp the cattails and rushes.

It was next to living in a town of birds
But she had hens and a row of bee hives.
When her mother died, and her girl, and Joel,
She told the bees so they’d not fly away
And hung black flags on the doors of the hives
Though they’d always go when they could to the woods
Or swarm on Sunday when she was at meeting.
For each who went she had told the bees.

Change and loss was what the brook cried
That she heard in the night — but she kept snug
With crow-wood for kindling, and the sun shone good
Through the tops of the pines, and her plants
Didn’t fail her, and the rosebush always bloomed
By the gnawed fencepost — what the horse had done
When they had a horse and a cow and a dog.

O there had been many, and now was there none?
Lost at sea, they said, her son gone to sea
Lost at sea they said. But if he wasn’t
And if he’d come back — so she’d stay till he came
Or whether or not.
Change and loss was what the brook cried
That she heard in the night when the clock whirred.

But when the fog from the southbank came through the firs
Till the air was like something made of cobwebs,
Thin as a cobweb, helpless as shadows
Swept here and there as the sea gulls mewed,
O then it seemed it was all one day
And no one gone and no one crossed over
Or when the rain gurgled in the eave spout
Or the wind walked on the roof like a boy.

Change and loss was what the brook cried
That she heard in the night when the clock whirred
Just before it clanged out its twelve heavy strokes
In the thick of the stillness, black as a crow,
But no scritching now with a scrawny great crackling,
And the rain not trickling, nothing to hark to,
Not even the tree at the north chamber window.

Till she routed it, horse and foot,
Thinking of walking to town through pastures
When the wood thrushes wept their notes
And the most was thick on the cobbled stones
With the heron wading among the hummocks
Of the pursy meadow that went down to the sea.

And she had knitting and folks to visit,
Preserves to make, and cream tartar biscuit,
She knew where was elocamp, coltsfoot, lobelia,
And she’d make a good mess up for all as could use it,
And go to the well and let down the bucket
And see the sky there and herself in it
As the wind threw itself about in the bushes and shouted
And another day fresh as a cedar started.

This was one of Jean Garrigue’s last poems, published posthumously in her last collection, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s most successful novel. Jewett tells the story of a woman novelist who travels to Maine to find peace and quiet and finish a book. She stays with and becomes fascinated with Mrs. Todd, the woman she boards with, a herbalist and the spiritual heart of her rural community.

In her study Jean Garrigue: A Poetics of Plenitude (1991), Lee Upton makes a good case that The Animal Hotel was, in part, inspired by The Country of the Pointed Firs and the character of Mrs. Todd. One can certainly see parallels between Garrigue’s bear and Mrs. Todd:

Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.

And, like the bear, Mrs. Todd carries with her “a loneliness you noticed in her that you saw in none of the other animals”:

It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.

As Upton writes, in Garrigue’s poem, “The sense of community oscillates with isolation.” The same sense carries through The Animal Hotel and, indeed, seems to have through the later works of Garrigue’s other inspiration, Josephine Herbst.