“The Bath,” “Axe Handles” by Gary Snyder

In “One Should Not Talk To A Skilled Hunter About What Is Forbidden By The Buddha,” Gary Snyder for some reason wants us to look deep into nature because that’s where the answer is, whatever it is that we are looking for, “Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed/plus one lizard foot.” And the last stanza he talks about a secret that is hidden in nature, which is what he talks about in the stanza before it, “and the secret hidden deep in that.” I like the details, he has good details here, “cold pelt, crinkle; and musky smell/mixed with dead-body odor starting,” boy this really stinks. I suspect that Snyder could be preaching to us and/or telling us something here, to look into nature, we might be surprised what we find there.

In “Hay For The Horses, again Snyder talks about nature, I suspect he’s a lover of nature. He has very good details, “With his big truckload of hay/behind the barn/With winch and ropes and hooks/We stacked the bales up clean/High in the dark, fleck of alfalfa/Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds.” In the last five lines, the man suddenly realizes how his life has been, “bucked hay,” sounds like the man had an ‘awakening,’ “I sure would hate to do this all my life/And dammit, that’s just what/I’ve gone and done.”

In “The Bath,” Snyder is so descriptive of the human body, more than we want to know, “And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus/his penis curving up and getting hard/as I pull back skin and try to wash it.” Also, the line after every stanza, “is this our body?” This sounds as if Snyder wants us to see ourselves nude and discover our nature. He’s telling us how we can discover nature within our bodies.

In “Axe Handles,” there are nice details, “Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet/One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.” I notice how Snyder uses repetition, “We’ll shape the handle/By checking the handle.” I founded interesting how Snyder makes reference to Ezra Pound and his teacher, “First learned from Ezra Pound/Rings in my ears/My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen/translated that…” The son being the handle, means he has control of the “axe,” And my son a handle, soon/to be shaping again, model.” Since “Pound was an axe/Chen was an axe, I’m an axe,” these people have no control over the “axe,” only his son does because he is the “handle.” Maybe the “axe” is a metaphor for being in control of our lives, who do we want to be in our lives, the “handle” or the “axe?