literature

Telephone Poles

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I never read John Updike until after he passed away and started to because numerous media outlets wrote lengthy tomes about his genius. “If I am a writer and a serious student of literature, I must read him” I thought.
One thing consistently stood out in all the obits / reviews: he wrote flowing, lovely, dense descriptions based on the idea that a flower is simply beautiful and there need not be any hidden meaning present when describing its loveliness. Does one always need to read into things? A rose is a rose is a rose, right? Up until now, I only knew that he and I shared the same birthday and that his four most popular books had Rabbit in the title (always helpful during Jeopardy). As I’ve always struggled with attaching meaning to the super cute descriptions that I develop I thought, here’s an author for me!
The New Yorker (where he got his start and which he contributed to steadily for his entire literary career) posted a number of his “Talk of the Town” pieces, poems and snippets of fiction and essays which really gave me a good introduction to his oeuvre.
When reading his material, one poem in particular (which originally appeared in the January 21, 1961 edition) really stood out. Therefore, I’ve posted it below for hopefully others to enjoy.
Telephone Poles
They have been with us a long time.
They will outlast the elms.
Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees
In his search for game,
Run through them. They blend along small-town streets
Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.
Our eyes, washing clean of belief,
Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses, struts, nuts, insulators, and such
Barnacles as compose
These weathered encrustations of electrical debris –
Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,
Could stun us to stone.
Yet they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughed a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces.
What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter
‘Unscrambled, is English? True, their thing share id negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By never being green.