We drove up to Provincetown on a recent trip to the Cape. The place was still in a summer mood with traffic bumper to bumper on Commercial Street in the East End and tourists lining up for ice cream on MacMillan Pier. But I was there in search of something that couldn’t be discovered in any of the bustling antique shops and art galleries, something I’d been longing to find for many years.
The poet Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006) summered in Provincetown for nearly half a century where, over the decades, he built an extensive and apparently magnificent garden. His first collection of poems was published in 1930 and he continued to write through his very long and productive life. He was a beloved teacher and, as a judge of the Yale Younger Writers series, influenced the careers of many of our finest poets. He was a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Poets House in New York. I was introduced to him by my late friend Carol Houck Smith who was an editor at W. W. Norton and who inherited him as an author when she was in her mid-70s and Kunitz was in his early 90s. She edited his last three books, including Passing Through, which won the National Book Award in 1995. He became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in 2000 when he was ninety-five years old.
Kunitz grew frail after the publication of Passing Through and told Carol that, though he might not be able to write more poems, he would like to write a book on poetry and his garden. The Wild Braid was written in his one hundredth year. Based on a series of interviews with Kunitz, it’s a profound and deeply moving meditation on life, aging, creativity, and the kindred spirit of all living things. It also brings alive his garden in Provincetown so vividly that I feel I’ve walked along its sloping pathways many times, though it could only have been in dreams. I’d never actually been there, and now I doubt I ever will. When we finally found the address in the West End that I believed to be his, the front yard was so overgrown we could barely see the house. Though I think Kunitz would have been the first to say that the essence of every garden lies in the imagination, a place of memory and hope — its completion forever out of reach.
“There are forms of communication beyond language that have to do not only with the body, but with the spirit itself, a permeation of one’s being,” Kunitz said about writing the poem below. “I strongly identify with Henry James’ explanation for what compelled him to write, ‘The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life….’ One of the great satisfactions of the human spirit is to feel that one’s family extends across the borders of species and belongs to everything that lives.”
The Snakes of September
by Stanley Kunitz
All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.