There must have been huge oaks and pines, cedars,
maybe madrone,
in Tuscany and Umbria long ago.
A few centuries after wood was gone, they began to build with
brick and stone.
Brick and stone farmhouses, solid, fireproof,
steel shutters and doors.
But farming changed.
60,000 vacant solid fireproof Italian farmhouses
on the market in 1970,
scattered across the land.
Sixty thousand affluent foreigners,
to fix them, learn to cook, and write a book.
But in California, houses all are wood —
roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground —
hundreds of thousands, made of strandboard, sheetrock,
plaster —.
They won’t be here 200 years from now — they’ll burn or rot.
No handsome solid second homes for
Thousand-year later wealthy
Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers here,
— oak and pine will soon return.
This poem was included in the book “This Present Moment: New Poems” by Gary Snyder.
Gary Snyder is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and a California native. He has published numerous books of poetry and prose, including Danger on Peaks (Counterpoint Press, 2005); The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998) (1999); Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997); No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The Practice of the Wild (1990); Left Out in the Rain, New Poems 1947-1985; Axe Handles (1983), for which he received an American Book Award; Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; Regarding Wave (1970); and Myths & Texts (1960). Snyder has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Snyder was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He was the recipient of the 2012 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets.
