
At the end of James Wright’s poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” as he writes about noticing the bronze butterfly, a leaf in green shadow, as he writes about the cowbells, and sunlight between two pines, the golden stones that were once horse droppings, as he writes about the chicken hawk, I’m always utterly gobsmacked by his conclusion: I have wasted my life. And it’s such a startling end to the poem that it’s haunted me for a decade. I’m forty-four years old and watched my first sunrise less than a month ago, and now I am no more than a few hours away from when I was lying in a hammock at someone’s farm, staring at a duck with her ducklings that barely rise above the growing grass, and again I am weeping, and exhausted, and willing to admit that I have not wasted my life.
Continue Reading