How We Got Here: Near Sheridan, Pastel, by John Cummings
How We Got Here
Railroad ties
sweat creosote
in the midday sun
spiced scent of cottonwood
and eucalyptus
rise from the river bottom
“secondary means”
the old presbyterian phrase
for the seemingly inauspicious
ways by which God
gets his will done
in this case waterways
stage routes briefly
and railroads
because of these
most before us settled
like silt to where they were
and we are now
at twelve years old
the world around us
seems like stagecraft
how it got here and why
we don’t much trouble ourselves to know
but step cautiously
tie to tie across the
trestle bridge above the river
then sit
and take council
feet dangling over tracks’ edge
into the canyon
talking for the first time
man to man it seems to us
about girls.
_____________
Keith Hansen
Review by Marc Janssen
This is a beautiful coming of age story. So many details so well put together. Only the two twelve-year-old boys really aren’t coming of age but maybe aspiring to come of age. This poem sets the stage, first with the lush details in the first two stanzas, and the next two stanzas setting the stage mentally. We don’t know what the boys said in the last line, I don’t know if it is as important of everything that leads up to it.
Review by Jared Pearce
I like how the big idea—how the world and all in it got here—wheels, descends, and then settles on the image of the final two lines.
Review by Nathan E. Lewis
Common experience. I connect with Keith’s boys stretching strides on railroad ties, taking a seat on the trellis, we’ve been told to avoid. The thrill of the height and a potential oncoming train frees us to open up to each other about an intimate topic. Unique experience. I don’t know the scent of cottonwood, though I’ve lived most of my life in their shade. But I do know the scent of eucalyptus, an exotic tree for me. I’m left stretching my mind as to where these two trees grow in the river bottom together. Consequently, I am transported into a foreign territory in which two boys walk and share a conversation common to my experience in an enchanting wood. The divine using secondary means to accomplish will is anything but static theology in Keith’s poem. Modes of transportation may develop overtime, some becoming obsolete, yet carrying us to significant moments in our maturation.
Review by Zeke Sanchez
“How We Got Here” builds steadily, unhurried, from where they are taking in the midday sun, and the creosote and the cottonwood and eucalyptus. It comments on the “secondary means” as God’s way to gradually get things done in indirect ways (I’m guessing). Again, a reference to time working to do God’s will. There is a quick tour of waterways, stage routes and railroads, and then it happens that the twelve year-old boys are crossing a trestle bridge over a river in a canyon. And God, working through “secondary means” – which I take to be “the passage of time” has brought these boys to the precipice to talk like men (about girls!).