Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "With This Flesh" is a sprawling, layered poem that intertwines history, ecology, labor, mythology, and personal reflection into a meditation on land, sustenance, and cultural memory. The poem moves across time and space, spanning colonial conquest, contemporary life in Baja California, and deep ancestral ties between humans, animals, and the environment. Snyder, with his characteristic engagement with both material reality and spiritual presence, constructs a text that is at once historical document, ethnographic account, and poetic invocation.

The poem is structured into three distinct sections, each centering on a different aspect of Baja California and its human and non-human inhabitants. The first section opens with a historical excerpt, a direct transcription of the Spanish colonial act of possession in 1539 by Francisco de Ulloa. This is a striking way to begin—a recorded moment of violent, symbolic transformation in which land is claimed by an imperial power through ritualistic gestures: “placing a hand on the sword,” “cutting trees,” “removing rocks,” and even “taking water from the sea.” These actions, meant to demonstrate ownership, are absurd in their futility—what does it mean to move rocks from “one place to another” as proof of dominion? The absurdity underscores the European conception of land as something to be conquered and possessed, contrasted implicitly with Indigenous understandings of place as lived-in, relational, and sacred.

The presence of the notary, Pedro Palenzia, whose duty is simply to record and affirm, reflects the bureaucratic machinery of empire—paperwork and ritual justifying a theft already assumed as inevitable. Snyder allows this colonial voice to speak for itself, but the poem as a whole functions as a counterpoint, shifting focus away from conquest and toward the deeper, older rhythms of life in Baja.

The second section, set in the present, captures the everyday life of a family in Baja California. Señora Maria Leree, at ninety-eight, rests in the shade of a century-old grapevine, her life spanning nearly a hundred years of slow change and endurance. Her daughter, Rebecca, having lived in Los Angeles for fifty-five years, represents a return migration, a cyclical movement between industrialized modernity and rural continuity. Dagobert, a beer truck driver, provides a window into the realities of labor in contemporary Baja: trucking beer over rutted roads, linking remote ranches to an economy that depends on movement and consumption. His comment that “the salt works at Guerrero Negro sell most of their salt to Japan” hints at the vast, unseen networks of global trade that underpin even the most isolated landscapes.

Snyder’s characteristic ecological awareness emerges in his observations of the land and its creatures. The mention of a “hummingbird’s nest with four eggs,” a “caracara on the top of a cardón,” and a “bobcat crossing the truck track at twilight” captures a living world that coexists with human activity but follows its own rhythms. The shift from human stories to these glimpses of wildlife reinforces the poem’s expansive gaze, reminding the reader that Baja is not just a place of people but an ecosystem, where birds, cats, and cacti persist regardless of human history.

The poet’s own presence becomes explicit in this section, as he is asked about his purpose: “You came down here to Baja for —inspiration? Poeta?” His response—"Yes, on these tracks. Rising early / Dry leather. Deep wells."—suggests that inspiration is not an abstract pursuit but something tangible, tied to the physicality of the land and its demands. The phrase “where we breathe, we bow” resonates as a kind of Zen acknowledgment of the necessity of humility before place. To exist in Baja, to live with its dryness and its deep wells, requires reverence.

The third section, "the arroyo," expands into mythology and the material realities of sustenance, centering on cattle and the ways their flesh and bones sustain human life. The reference to the “bulls of Iberia” invokes both Spain’s legacy of conquest and its deep-rooted pastoral traditions, leading into a meditation on The Rape of Europa, a 17th-century painting by Simon Vouet. The mythological bull, adorned with flowers, carrying the goddess Europa, is juxtaposed against the stark reality of “the bony cows of Baja.” This contrast encapsulates a broader theme of the poem—the tension between the romanticized past and the hard physicality of lived experience.

Snyder then moves into an inventory of how cattle are used in Baja: dried meat (charqui), hides for shoes and saddles, bones for buttons, fat for lard, hooves for glue. This catalog is both practical and reverent, acknowledging the complete integration of the animal into human survival. The description of a “leathery twisted ropy Christ figure racked to dry” links the image of dried meat to Catholicism’s central sacrifice, layering Indigenous and colonial histories of survival. The emphasis on how every part of the animal is used speaks to an ethic of resourcefulness and respect, contrasting with the wastefulness of industrialized economies.

The final passage introduces the language of the Cochimi people, listing place names and their meanings: “Camané caamanc—creek of the cardón cactus,” “Cunitca cahel—water of the large rocks.” This linguistic moment, placed at the poem’s conclusion, serves as a reclamation of history—these names predate the Spanish conquest, representing a deeper, older connection to the land that was never erased, only obscured. Language here functions as a form of resistance, a way of asserting presence despite colonial violence.

The poem closes with the voice of a “ragged white-bearded vaquero,” a cowboy whose simple greetings—"A su servicio!" and "Go with God!"—carry an old-world formality. His words serve as a benediction, linking the land, labor, and spiritual endurance. The final lines—"with this meat I thee feed / with this flesh I thee wed."—invoke both the Eucharist and the vows of marriage, binding sustenance and commitment into a singular act. To eat, to live, to wed—these are not separate, but interwoven processes.

"With This Flesh" is a poem of possession, but not in the way of Ulloa’s colonial claim. Instead of taking ownership through sword and decree, Snyder’s possession is one of intimacy—of eating, breathing, observing, and recording. The poem resists conquest, favoring deep attention and respect for place, history, and life’s material foundations. Through its layered structure—historical document, contemporary observation, mythological reflection, and Indigenous language—it creates a vision of Baja that is complex, reverent, and ultimately inseparable from the flesh of the land itself.

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