BY JUSTIN MAXWELL
At some time the dead will be recognized
As high school sweethearts who went mad in the barns,
Old girl friends dressed like night in the forest,
Dressed in the ruins of mist and sensitive fly rods.
--Frank Stanford, “In These Rooms”
I am visiting Mountain Home, Arkansas, for solitude, fly fish, and gregarious trout. Unfortunately, heavy rains make the rivers inaccessible, and normally knee-deep water is well over my head. Searching for options that don’t guarantee drowning, I realize the poet Frank Stanford is buried just over a three-hour drive away. His headstone is nestled under a yellow pine, in St. Benedict’s Cemetery, Subiaco. I’ve been reading his poems intensely for the last few years, and a collection of his work is on the table in the cheap motel room I use as an ersatz fishing camp.
Stanford appeals to me. He’s drawn to this region for the same complex cultural and personal reasons I am. His poems foreground facets of my life that are hard to see when I look at my own emotional world. I read Stanford and see an unsung nature writer. His work is decidedly rural, yet he doesn’t immediately sound like a nature writer because he uses the Ozarks and the levees of Arkansas to explore the concealed, tender parts of the psyche instead of foregrounding the environment itself. The landscape around Mountain Home is the surface information of Stanford’s formative years; it is the physical analog to his emotional and aesthetic worlds.
For a borderline recluse like me, Stanford’s grave site initially seems like a good pilgrimage. St. Benedict’s avoids the cliché of Père Lachaise in Paris, with its dead-end fantasies of Jim Morrison. It lacks the history of Mount Hope in Rochester, with Susan B. Anthony’s grave wallpapered in “I Voted” stickers. Without tourists, St. Benedict’s doesn’t invite the falderal of St. Louis #1 in New Orleans, wherein Marie Laveau’s tomb is covered with lipstick marks, X’s, and various totems. Such offerings are too intrusive for me. I have no sacrifice to bring, and I’m not much for gifts. With no ritual to perform in Subiaco, I picture myself standing in that quiet spot, looking at a gravestone and quickly falling into ennui. I have theatre tickets for later tonight in Fayetteville, and I fear my internal clock would be ticking too loudly to have any kind of epiphanic experience in the cemetery because of the drive time. I decide not to visit Stanford’s grave.
Instead, I put my body in the landscape of Stanford’s life, in the landscape of his poems. I drive about 30 minutes to the Fred Berry Conservation Education Center, just outside of Yellville, to wander through a nature preserve. The Center didn’t exist during Stanford’s lifetime, but it is just off the main road from Mountain Home to Fayetteville, where he attended high school and college respectively. It’s a route he must have traveled from time to time. The Center and its grounds nestle into an inverted V of land, clearly demarcated by Crooked Creek flowing between stout limestone hills. My choice is walking meditation over pilgrimage.
Stanford is not known for his landscapes. Instead, he is best known for The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, a sprawling, surreal poem exceeding 15,000 lines. His work is often associated with exploring the violence and poverty ubiquitous to the Ozarks. The poems have a wild love for places, but use the region to take us into the alarmingly human, instead of using place to escape humanity. He’s profoundly unlike other great, male, nature poets like Robert Frost, Han Shan, and Gary Snyder. Robert Frost shows the landscape of New England with his own fears repressed to just below the skin of bent birch trees. Hen Shen shows us the craggy wilderness of Tang Dynasty China with a lush detachment. Gary Snyder gives us a natural world that a problematic and repressive mainstream America squats on. Stanford uses the Arkansas landscape as a context, consistently pointing at an emotional subtext. Objects, locations, people, the nouns of the living, appear and disappear, stumble and conjoin; his poetry staggers over a landscape of steep, close hills. Stanford tumbles people and landscape together like a rockslide exposing his experience of a very American pain.
The surface of a river is a surreptitiously important part of the adventure of fly fishing. The boundary of the surface gives the hobby a quasi-mystical quality because water does complex things to light, like a clerestory window. Light reflects back from the surface making glare for everything above, a shine that’s not easily seen through. However, the light that doesn’t reflect up as glare bends when it passes through the surface. This refraction allows fish to see over the horizon of the bank. A fish can see a person approaching a stream before the person can see the stream. Because of its optics, stream fishing is like dreaming, both wandering and attentive. Today, I intend to wander but unintentionally push through the surface tension of Stanford’s world.
I park outside the Fred Berry Conservation Center grounds, at the end of County Road 4002, an area called Kelly’s Slab. The Slab is a low, concrete dam that serves as a portage and public access point on Crooked Creek. This low dam is modern, with plenty of space for water to sluice through. It is environmentally smart, good for the river. The dam has been built and rebuilt over the years—under the dam are the bones of older dams. It represents attempts to manage the landscape, generation after generation. When I last saw the Slab, the previous winter, it was the clean-white of new concrete. Today it is under many feet of turgid water. Nearby, is a similarly-new bridge connecting the end of CR 4002 to “Conservation Lane” inside the park. There’s parking on both sides of the bridge. I park outside the Center and walk across.
Entering the Center on foot is a very particular sensation. Standing on the bridge, the intensity of the swollen creek is physical and immediate. The water makes a great roiling hiss. The air is sweet with the smell of mud and new grass. There’s just a hint of ozone leftover from the storms. The barometric pressure is low but stable; it’s easy to feel expansive and loose-limbed. Swallows and fly-catchers hunt insects after their storm-forced fast. Whole trees, from root ball to upper branches, trundle downstream in the brown and white water. A retaining wall is almost completely submerged; normally, I would look up to see the base of that wall while fishing in the creek. Today, the USGS gauge measures the water in Crooked Creek at 5,000 cubic feet per second. The waters are five times their usual volume, but whispering about receding. Over the course of the day, the creek will fall to 3,000 and by tomorrow return to its average of about 1,000 cubic feet per second—somewhere between knee and thigh deep in most places. The rivers of northern Arkansas are sudden and dynamic.
Today is sunny. In the preserve, the land is dry, if spongy in the low spots. The Conservation Center is new construction, a manufactured landscape masquerading as the natural environment. It is lovely. The park is green and soft, accessible and inviting. The grass is in. The trees are budding, not quite in bloom. The buds give the hard edges of near-black bark and brown hills an easy soft-focus. Spring buffs the crisp, winter lines of the hills and trees. The Center creates the illusion of a natural place. For many people, a pristine landscape is pretty, and the concept of pristine is holy. I am one of these people.
The Conservation Center’s new walking path begins near the bridge. The path is easy to navigate, blue-gray gravel laid inside a wood frame. I follow the path along Crooked Creek; still near-flood stage, the creek is big like a river. After a hundred yards or so, the path turns and follows a feeder stream, a tiny brook that flows into the larger creek. The brook is too small for a name. Even the overly-welcoming signs (explaining that deer leave tracks and birds exist) don’t give it a name. The gravel path follows the brook through a thin riparian zone, between a steep hill on the far side and a high bank on the near side, separating the brook from a grassy field. The path parallels the brook to the foot of another hill and turns right to skirt the steep slope. To the left is a small plunge pool, where the water of the brook, flowing out between the intersecting hills, drops into a little basin scoured down to limestone bedrock.
I step over the wooden frame of the gravel path and walk a few yards down to the plunge pool. Because of the flooding, some fish would move from Crooked Creek into this unnamed brook finding comfort in its clear, shaded water. Since fish don’t have eyelids, they consistently seek shade and avoid sediment. The pool is a small oval, and the only part of the brook deep enough to provide a modicum of safety and comfort for a fish. The pool is empty. I don’t know why, and I don’t have enough evidence to honorably speculate. However, I like the image of a full and happy raccoon sleeping nearby. The next day, on a different river, I see a yard-long gar, resting in the clear water of a similarly out-of-the-way pool—it is a very validating fish.
As I look at the plunge pool, some lines from Stanford’s “What Claude Wanted to Tell Her” begin to percolate up into my experience of the Ozarks: “The afternoons of the gar … / The nights of the oarless boats … / … but where are the dead?” Sometimes Stanford’s poems are gar, ancient and brutally tense. He redirects my vision like a boat in the current. I turn back towards the path and notice erosion-exposed rock inside the high bank separating the brook from the field. Here are the dead. The exposed rock isn’t visible from the path, just from the brook’s side of the embankment. The stone rises up strangely in bits and blocks, not at all like the bedrock I expect. Then I realize the exposed rock isn’t bedrock, but laid stone. I’m looking at the exposed side of a rock wall, reclaimed by dirt, undergrowth, and scrub trees. The rocks are a once-firm border now buried, with sections of wall exposed like snapshots. Someone in the 19th century wanted this brook to stay in its bank. The wall keeps the stream narrow, making the watercourse comparatively faster, cooler, and better oxygenated than it would be otherwise. At least, that’s how I see the wall as an angler and armchair environmentalist. If a farmer built the wall, they probably saw it as flood control. If a slave built it, they probably saw it as just another day.
A few steps get me back to the gravel path. I reexamine the landscape, look at it from the opposite direction, with the brook at my back. Now, “…I don’t know if what I see / is what really is or what I don’t see is….” like the narrator says in The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. After all, I am only a visitor to Stanford’s landscape. From my new direction, I can see that I’m standing on the back edge of an artificial platform where the earth is elevated and leveled off, probably to support a building like a small barn or stable; although there’s only vegetation now. This corner is a good place for a building, shady in the summer, sunny in the winter, and heavily sheltered from the wind. Plus, it’s easy to build a platform here, since the hill provides both a readymade back wall for the platform and the construction fill. The open, inviting, treeless middle of the park was probably pasture once. The Fred Berry web page calls this area a “flood plain,” which is technically true too. Beyond mentioning a “dairy farm,” the web page doesn’t really have details about what sits on this landscape between the wild flood plain and the simulated wilderness of the Conservation Center. With this new context, the plunge pool behind me becomes a good place to draw water for a few animals, or a naturally occurring trough.
I realize there must have been a road to get to the platform, since such construction doesn’t happen in isolation. I turn, face the ridge, and a road appears. Or, more accurately, I see the tree-less, road-wide swath of grass and brush leading up the slope through the woods. I didn’t see it before. I wonder if I’m really seeing it now, or just wanting to see it. Perception, like a stony hillside, is less reliable than it seems; after all, I have caught an embarrassing number of trout-shaped sticks. In the right context, things can appear and disappear. The road-sized swath happens to be on the easiest place to track up the hill—strong bedrock close to the surface provides a solid roadbed, and the edge of the hill keeps the grade to a minimum while still clearing the ridge. It’s a prudent spot for a road.
The remains of this probable-road in the Center are now mostly moss, brambles, and stony chunks of the hill that fell and lay unmoved. Perhaps it is the landscape’s memory of a dirt road. The hills in Arkansas are brown, gritty sandstone on top of smooth, blue limestone, with some intermixing where one geological epoch welds onto the previous one. I realize that if there really was a road here, it should lead somewhere.
I follow the reclaimed, probable-road. It does lead somewhere. In “Women Singing When Their Husbands Are Gone” Stanford shows that he’s heard the call of such places too: “I warned you / About those hidden voices in the woods / Mouths like does eating moss.” I suspect we both know such warning signs are like “sirens” labeling dangerous spots on ancient maps—places curiosity causes us to sail toward. The road ends just before the crest of the hill, at another platform. Like the platform at the base of the hill, the one at the crest is also exposed to the sun and sheltered from the wind. The platform at the top of the road is formed from cinder blocks, newer than the platform at the bottom of the hill. Scattered near the platform are mechanical remnants, the sort of debris archeologists call “settlement activity,” the discarded bits and pieces of people’s lives. Odd, metal parts are tumbled in almost-piles, rusted into a post-industrial mélange. Some of the rusted objects are engine parts, perhaps from a tractor or other substantial vehicle. There’s also a sheet metal frame with trees growing up through it, and cylindrical machines that I don’t understand.
The cinder block platform probably supported a farm building and the stony, thin land with its rusty detritus is probably where a farmer abandoned unrepairable machines as they broke down and dropped out of use. This is a place of abandonment, as is much of Stanford’s Arkansas. Stanford gives us a landscape that is fragmented, isolated, so strongly juxtaposed that things intermix. His landscapes are intrinsically of the Ozarks, where the close hills and narrow ravines create a physical suddenness. This is a landscape of separate, interconnected places we can’t see until we’re right up against them, sudden and personal. To paraphrase a line from Stanford’s “Anchoress,” my heart leans into dangerous places. This is the way the Ozarks reveal themselves: immediate, unforgiving, and evocative.
A few yards up the slope from the platform the ground is open. It is probably a former pasture. If it were a fallow field, a crop would leave tell-tale growth from whatever was planted there previously. Unlike the land at the foot of the hill, this open area is not groomed for company by the Center. Just as I decide this place was shaped for agricultural use instead of enjoyment, I see daffodils. They are growing in loose, wild rows amongst the grass. The daffodils were planted with attention. The burst of yellow lines curve between the edge of the pasture and the ridge of the hill. Perhaps they once bordered a foot path. They’re at a point both practical and picturesque, between the pasture and the unfit-for-walking slope of the hill. It’s where I’d put a path if I lived here. Since the daffodils imply a path, I follow the flowers. After thirty yards they lead nowhere I can discern. I don’t know why the flowers are here, as daffodils lining the path to the dump are profoundly incongruous.
If the road traveled past the settlement activity, I can’t find it. This seems to be the stopping point, yet through old trees, down-slope, I can see something inorganic looking at the edge of the unnamed brook, which runs parallel to the road but at the bottom of the hill. It is about a hundred feet away from me and well upstream from the plunge pool. There’s no visible trail to the brook. The terrain is navigable, if awkward. Beside the brook is a hollow, concrete basin—perhaps a small cistern, the top of some sort of culvert, or housing for a pump. The basin is a hollow, but incredibly durable, four foot cube. Then I realize there’s also an earthen dam jutting out from the hillside, cutting into the brook, about 20 feet downstream of the basin. Perhaps these two constructions are the remnants of a millpond and the concrete cube held a water wheel. Perhaps this was an attempt at making a little reservoir, and the concrete cube housed a water pump to pull fresh water up to the pasture or platform.
At a glance, this little dam looks completely natural, earthen and covered in small trees. The trees on the dam are about five to seven inches in diameter, much younger than most of the trees on the hillside. These young trees are the same size as the trees growing up through the metal remnants near the daffodils. Without leaves, I have no idea as to their species. Without the species, I can’t estimate the age based on their size, but they reveal both spots were abandoned at about the same time, further implying their connection. Two things with no direct bond but their proximity. Their connection is a visceral juxtaposition.
The earthen dam with its little trees would be invisibly organic except that the dam sits in the streambed in a decidedly unnatural way, perpendicular to the flow of current. The dam also crosses about four-fifths of the streambed. Was this a sluice gate like the modern dam back at Kelly’s Slab? Was the dam completely across and then breached? After seeing this one small dam, I begin to see them in the region, in other very small brooks with steep grades. These dams always look incredibly abandoned, and I only see them in places that are lonely and long-unused. After seeing several more small dams, I suspect they are flood mitigation, keeping the creeks and gullies moving while slowing the extra water after heavy rains or snow melt—an antiquated method for managing the landscape. But, beyond my suppositions, I do not know their purpose.
From the concrete basin and dam, I follow a few deer trails hoping to reconnect with the lost road and continue my adventure. The game paths lead away from the site on the hill but don’t arrive at anything human. The animals are blazing trails on the landscape, moving over it, shaping its newest moment. The site by the lost road is abandoned, being subsumed. The road ends.
Haunted-feeling roads are ubiquitous to Stanford’s experience. They are both the physical reality of his world and a metaphor of the Ozarks: there and not there, present and abandoned. Simultaneously inhabited and isolated. Such roads appear, then fade—a light scar on the skin of the hills. Growing up in this landscape, a poet like Stanford (and C.D. Wright) almost had to name their press Lost Roads. Without a socioeconomic model to maintain them, these places heal over quickly. Objects sit along lost roads, implying generations of memory. A thumbprint marks what a person has touched and left, not their life. Mountain Home was a dying town in the 30s and 40s; the farms around it were being abandoned by the hundreds. The construction of the Norfolk and Bull Shoals Dams turned two river valleys into massive, branching reservoirs and almost-inarguably pulled the whole region up from Dust Bowl style poverty when Stanford moved here. Yet, I once met an old man still angry about the dams because they ruined a “pretty good bass river” by turning it into one of the best trout fisheries in America and simultaneously building a sustainable economy for the foreseeable future. Even as an old man, he needed resentment to protect his subjective bruise. I wasn’t going to press his plum-colored memory and tell him that nearby Crooked Creek has excellent bass fishing. The topography conceals the human experience within the place—a fragmented and fractured land for a fragmented and fractured psyche, a culture inclined to hide its wounds.
Hurt is just underneath the surface of Stanford’s poetry. It’s a hurt common in American culture, but few of us talk about it well. His experience is different enough from mine that I get the emotional space necessary for perspective, yet close enough that I can see the paths that connect us. As an outsider, Stanford’s poems show me the Ozarks that I suspect exist but don’t readily perceive. Each holler has the potential to be an envelope of sins, the flap easily folded over. I am an outsider to this place, and Stanford’s poems serve as an emotional cartography. The people of the Ozarks often wear that cultural pain on their faces, mouths taut, eyes flashing. Always some suspicion, unconsciously asking: Will this new encounter press on the bruise? I saw the same faces growing up in a part of the Rust Belt once called The Burned-Over District, an area prone to psychic bruising since the ebb of the fur trade—the first indication that exploitation was an unsustainable economic model. A pattern that repeated when the blue walleye went extinct and when the steel mills closed. Political and religious movements roared over my landscape too: Seneca’s rebellion, British military occupation until 1794, emancipation, suffrage, Grangers, the first natural gas well, Spiritualism. Waves of cultural change and economic collapse swept my part of the country like prairie fires. I grew up living on layers of ashes. My region offered a different landscape from Stanford’s. Where I’m from there’s no holler to hide violence in—it builds on the horizon like the grey wall of a blizzard.
With no route forward, I follow the road’s old course back to the new, clearly-delineated gravel trail laid down by the Center. I leave a place marked by people leaving, human strata piled up landscape upon landscape, life upon life. In the poem “Anchoress,” Stanford describes a place also marked by humans leaving: “Deep in the hills there is a cold shack / where nipples leave their rouge on the mirror // And you pass yourself on the road riding another way.” It seems fitting to follow an abandoned track up into history, into the hills, into the casually-secret places of honest detritus.
Every time I come upon places like this abandoned road, I end up asking questions: How much is lost to me? How many things have I passed unknowingly? Blinking in and out of awareness is a common experience in late-stage alcoholism. I didn’t even know I had such experiences, until talking over coffee with semi-strangers and sharing the things we survived. Such lost times are not the passing out unconscious experienced by someone with blurry recollections of the previous night. Instead, blackouts are a sustained quasi-functioning, the minutes, hours, or days, when we’re too drunk for our brains to record data, yet our seemingly-impossible capacity for alcohol keeps us going. Eventually, the blood alcohol level drops, and the brain starts recording again. We become aware in mid-action. In the process of telling stories to rebuild my life, I realize how much is unrecognizable.
When I was a drinker, I lived in an emotional landscape that was sudden and close, like hills. It was also violent, a string of immediacies. I emerge from a blackout at a urinal. I’ve no idea where I am. I finish, wash my hands, and step out into a hallway. It’s a university dormitory. I’m dating a woman at a nearby college and have a good friend at a university a few hours’ drive away. This is probably one of their dorms. I need to find out which one. The girlfriend has a car. She can get me home. The other friend is much further away and doesn’t have a car, which means, if I’m there, I have to find how I got there, and how I’m getting home. SUNY dormitory hallways are effectively identical. I wander.
I find a dorm room door with my girlfriend’s name on it, and the name of her roommate too. The door is unlocked. I go in. She’s asleep. Her roommate is gone. My shirt is on the floor. I realize I’m not wearing my own clothes. She comes to half-awake and contentedly mumbles “Where were you?” I reply, “I don’t know.” I climb into the narrow bed. We curl up. The memory ends. A story without a start.
I and some friends peel out of a driveway in a large, mid-80’s muscle car. I jump into the back seat without hesitation and find myself on a layer of unopened bottles that fill the deep foot wells in the back, piling up and forming a layer two-deep over the entire back seat. I lie on top of them like some kind of ambitious, 17-year-old cirrhosis spelunker. From the front seat, two friends tell the story of scoring so much booze. I break the paper seal on a glass bottle of clear liquid, and the plastic cap clicks free from its retaining ring. The memory ends. These stories are floodwaters coursing between hills, murky and fast, without upstream context; stories missing their component parts, often no beginning or no conclusion.
In another, I wake up on a floor, and look at the ceiling for a long time. It’s familiar, but I don’t know where I am. Someone is breathing in the same room.
In another, I wake up, take off my shirt, and my chest is a solid bruise from my collar bone down to almost the bottom of my abdomen; later, friends fill in the details.
In another, I wake up with money in my pocket after leaving broke.
In another, it happens again.
In another, I wake up soaked in blood, like I had showered in it.
In another, I wake up that way again. I moved through an emotional landscape Stanford would recognize; he maps it in poem after poem. Unlike Stanford, I get lucky. I survive my alcoholism and sell my gun.
When I return to the new, gravel trail, I follow it. The trail curves parallel to the bottom of the hill, the newest thumbprint on the landscape. Conservation signs talk vacuously about the plants and animals one might see. A few yards off the trail is a barbed wire fence, rusted and fallen into curled strands. All that’s holding the wires together are stout trees that grew when someone stopped mending the fencerow. The fence protected the saplings from hungry deer and now the trees have matured and engulfed the fence, keeping it from rusting into oblivion. Some memory of the farm still keeps the “floodplain” separate from the slope and crest of the hill. The signs remind me that this new layer of landscape is like Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, well-intentioned, important, and artificial. My sense of irony is rewarded for the Leopold epiphany when the next placard quotes him: “Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, water, plants and animals that collectively comprise the land.” The sign doesn’t offer a source beyond the author’s name. I can’t imagine the Center putting up Stanford quotes.
The gravel path loops around the floodplain and intersects with Conservation Way, the modern dirt road connecting the visitor center to the entrance bridge. The Way also intersects with wheel ruts that serve as a track to the far end of the park. Since I have time and curiosity, I follow the track. After a half-mile or so, a small herd of six deer comes out of the tall grass. They see me and stop. I am upwind, so they can’t readily smell me. I am on foot, so they probably can’t hear me over the sound of their own bodies swooshing through the high grass. For them, I simply appear, fully formed and unexpected. They do not handle it well. While deer are curious, they are not creatures that enjoy surprises. Their reaction to my arrival is like my reaction to encountering most Stanford poems, engaged and disquieted. The deer turn to face me, in a line, fifteen yards away. Their distance is a nervous caesura.
Unsure what to do, the deer bob their heads in a V shape, giving them multiple perspectives with which to gauge my distance. Deer see in two dimensions; their world is a flattened landscape. They move their head in a V pattern to view something from multiple angles, creating depth of field, reading and re-reading the text of our encounter. In The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You the deer “lift up their heads / and the eyes that are seeing everything . . . / are those of a spotted fawn so what we see is not what we have ever seen before.” Each re-reading is a new text. Stanford returns to the same landscapes, the same habitats, as he tries to peer into something incredibly human within his precipitous emotional landscape, an attempt to comprehend a stratigraphy of suffering that he can’t anesthetize. We both try to push through the surface glare of unhappiness. The deer assess my potential for violence.
After several long minutes, the deer slowly flag and spring away, down toward the churning Crooked Creek. I’ve no idea why they choose the turgid creek over the clear brook. I startle this same group of deer six more times in the next half hour as I follow the track to the far end of the park. Each time I encounter the deer, they are surprised anew and react with increasing panic. Except for their curiosity, or maybe because of it, deer don’t seem to make good choices. There’s no hunting in the park. Cars drive slowly on Conservation Way. These deer are never in danger from a human. They could easily stop or hide, disappear into the tall grass or tree cover. The last time I see these deer, they crisscross the trail in front of me at full gallop. Perhaps I am an excuse to run. Under their fear is pleasure, the hard churning of muscle, the joyful driving of being so very alive. After all, the things people do to change their emotional states can be alarming and dramatic—my vision often lacks depth of field too.
Leaving the park, I walk back across the entrance bridge and rejoin the end of County Road 4002. On that bridge, the previous winter, I met the architect who designed the park. Each studying the creek, we met in the middle of the bridge, and struck up a conversation. We talked about riverine systems, wing dams, erosion, and deposition zones. He told me what the river looked like ten years ago, and we talked about what it will look like ten years from now. Stanford’s end could still be my end. The possibility that I return to his path is a steep reality of my life. That winter day, the architect, and I were on the bridge for different reasons. The architect was retired and checking up on his handiwork. I was scouting places to catch winter smallmouth. The fish busily live in an environment they cannot distinguish from wilderness, made and managed in a world beyond their comprehension. I live over 500 miles away from these fish, pop into their lives as if from nowhere, seriously startle a few of them, and then depart. Perhaps the difference between construction and environment is just a sequence, just the top layer in my depth of field. The land around a river is a treatise on local history; its oxbows hint at its past, its bends foreshadow its future. Had I known about the platforms or the abandoned road at the time, I would have asked the architect on the bridge a lot of questions.
I return to my car, change my shirt, and drive a few hours to TheatreSquared, in Fayetteville. There I watch Vietgone, a contemporary play about the integration of Vietnamese refugees into American society shortly after the fall of Saigon. The play is set a few hours’ drive south of Fayetteville, deeper into Arkansas, closer to Subiaco; the show takes place a few months before my birth, a few years before Stanford’s death. It is a lovely production and contains much more hip hop than I expected. It is another surprise on this curving, ridge-covered landscape—even deep bruises can heal. It is better to not pop in on Stanford’s resting place and then pop out again. It seems best to be in the place of the moment and let events tumble together, like a rockslide. All I can offer Stanford is solitude. Daffodils return.
Justin Maxwell was awarded an ATLAS-BoR grant for his play Palimpsests of Agrippina Minor. His short play “Now Maybe Sunbeam” recently premiered online. His plays are widely produced. His prose has appeared in many journals. Justin is an associate professor teaching playwriting at the University of New Orleans.
Process Note: Usually I put essays together at my desk, like building with mnemonic Legos, but “Of Daffodils” started to form in the middle of the experience itself, when the stone wall and the abandoned road appeared like a conjuring trick. Writing this essay also involved a lot of cutting down, when I usually build up; I removed a whole second essay from the middle of this one. Hopefully, that other text will stand on its own with some revision, which suddenly seems like a whole other kind of appearance….