The Garden of the Earth: Summer in the Berkshires -- Too Big for the Camera

Photos taken on our recent stay in Berkshire County, in western Massachusetts. With hikes in sunny wildflower meadows, silent greenwoods; under billowing clouds, along brooks -- in Jug End in South Egremont, at Tyringham Cobble, though Stevens Glen, up Hancock hills where the Shakers once lived and dammed a flowing brook for power... also through Bullard Wood and Gould Meadow, bordered by the Stockbridge Bowl and Tanglewood... and many miles to go this autumn.

Too Big for the Camera: Jug End, Tyringham, Stevens Glen

These are the far fields

We drive, now, to find them

No plough has cleaved their earth

    for generations,

the croplands and pastures of a nearly forgotten civilization, 
as if aliens had once farmed these lands, 
imposing upon them the annual revolution of the blade and the hoe, 
a visceral survival of coaxing food from the earth, feeding your beasts in the fields,
so they would feed you. 
Our money has moved on, and we have followed
No more cash on the barrel-head,
greenbacks no longer wave from the seed head,
those once wavy fingers of Cornus, 
the foundational green divinity of a civilization
that was once our own

Earth restored to earth, left fallow, abandoned to the 

    peculiar beauties of elements cruel

        to human flesh, the cold love pressed upon living things

Now we turn earth and water to the playgrounds of cities,

    abandon the vine and tangle, the thrust of stem and spike 

        and flower,

the old romp with Ceres in the unregulated market place of fertilization

So they return, 

old world incarnations of the pastoral and hay field 
uncultivated by human hand, 

they bloom yellow, white, the pinkish blue of honey-bee balm suddenly everywhere this season, a harvest of itself;

lacy tops, yellow-headed circles of transfigured solar—

All his primal energy unrestrained by human geometries,

    evolution in confusion

What do we see in you?

Deep and distant Jug Head, or sunny Gould,

Or the climbing barrow of Tyringham, cobbled from IceAge vintages

    surging with richly flowered necklaces of white and orange,

corn blue, field flowers unknown to us, a native nirvana

Catnip for butterflies and bees grass-hoppering in the midday sun,

    feeding splendor for the swallows,

flyover for the hawk,

these massy estates of some wild pluming

We go only to gaze,
stroll in the mowin’ --
keep to the preservationists' paths,

obeying the signs

    Eyes on the earth

        and all its splendid jewelry

        configurations

        of a greeny wealth gone wild