♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -The ambiguity of who this person is.

Like, is it a rancher or, you know, is it a hunter, or it's God?

-When I first read Tracy K. Smith's "Hill Country," the surprise entrance of a character named God made me laugh out loud and made me want to discuss the poem with Tracy.

-But this is Hill Country in Texas, and I haven't spent much time there.

But one afternoon, several years ago, I was giving a reading that evening, and so one of our hosts said, "I own a lot of land.

I'd like to take you and show you what this place is like."

But when I sat down and I wrote this in Hill Country outside that same afternoon, with butterflies and dragonflies and beautiful sunlight, it became something else.

I felt the silence, and that just felt like an imaginative or even a spiritual space opening up for me.

[ Choir singing ] -Tracy K. Smith is a poet, memoirist, and teacher.

She won the Pulitzer Prize and was the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States.

To read Tracy's "Hill Country," I gathered nine interpreters -- Pastor Mackey and five congregants from Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona, two rabbis who lead Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Massachusetts, and, on his porch in the Texas Hill Country, celebrated singer-songwriter and practicing Buddhist Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

-This area that we live in is called the Hill Country.

That's the nickname for this area of Central Texas.

It's hills, but it's also desert.

It's thorny.

It's harsh in certain ways.

And at the same time, it's very soft and beautiful.

-It seems to me there are probably many hill countries invoked here.

-I like the largeness and the everywhere sense of just hill country that's not specified.

-I connected it to not necessarily this particular landscape like Texas and that kind of territory, but it's more about the mountains and the hills because it's so majestic.

-I think the hills remind me -- they help me to remember the vastness of all of it.

-If you listen to nature in the way that I was trying to do on that trip, it is a sacred space that you -- you're led to recognize.

♪♪ -Artists have long treated the American landscape as spiritual space.

The Hudson River painters of the 19th century touched American mountaintops with heavenly light.

Westward migrants bestowed Scripture names on their places of settlement.

And in the spirituals of enslaved people longing for freedom, the Ohio River became the River Jordan.

The very first book in English printed in North America was a translation of the Hebrew Book of Psalms, prayers to a God who lives in the heights in hill country.

I hear the lyricism of biblical language and of biblical metaphor.

-My imagination is full of Bible stories.

As a church-going child, a landscape where Christ walked or where His followers scattered, and I was definitely thinking of Moses coming down from the mountains.

-[ Singing in Hebrew ] -Hills are a unique part of the biblical landscape.

-In the Bible, so many transformational things happened in the hills.

-♪ I lift my eyes ♪ ♪ To the mountain from... ♪ I think about the hills of Jerusalem.

♪ ...my help come ♪ -When we go to Jerusalem, we usually say we go up to the mountains and that a lot of our psalms have also that reference of looking up to Jerusalem, looking up to the hills.

-♪ My helps comes from Adonai ♪ -Psalm 121 says, "We will lift up our eyes beyond the hills."

-♪ The heavens and the earth ♪ -"Down from the cloud-bellies and the bellies of hawks" describes him coming down from the bellies of the clouds as only the birds can do.

[ Wings flap ] -There's a perspective shift.

To come down from the cloud-bellies and then the bellies of hawks, which we really only see from down below.

When we look up, we see the hawks.

[ Hawk screeches ] -I love sound.

So when I see words like "caracaras," I'm hearing the air, the flapping of wings, the calls.

[ Bird calling ] -It did such a great job of painting that imagery that I naturally added some -- some audio for myself.

[ Wings flapping, bird calling ] -"Hill Country" reminds us that poems can be much more than statements of meaning.

In this poem, sounds magically conjure images.

Tracy's use of hard C's and K's throughout "Hill Country" seems to etch the features of this scene in sharpest outline.

The very shape of this poem, a broad column but bounded on both sides, intensifies all experience within it.

-"Down from the cloud-bellies..." -Wide enough for the mind to sweep and drawing the eye around bends, this rough blank verse form conveys a sense of mind in motion, enhanced by the rhythmic repetition of sounds.

-"From the weathered bed of planks outside the cabin where he goes to be alone with his questions."

It's a rhythmic cadence that allows the mind to wander.

It's descending down the page based on a rhythmic momentum, coming down into a space where silence and questions can be felt.

♪♪ -It brings up two different worlds for me.

One is the rancher with the jeep, which, you know -- which I'm real familiar with.

And then it brings up images of the old forest hermit saint going off to meditate.

-I love that statement, "soundlessness that shrouds him."

It's almost as though God did not want his presence to distract from what he's hearing and seeing and observing.

-I have a really hard time that God is being called a he.

I do not ever call God a he.

So I had to translate the pronoun "he" of God to no pronoun.

But then I love the image of, like, God is -- Is God coming out from retreat?

Like, God has this little cabin where God goes?

-Dr. Lee Brown says to another preacher, "I know what kind of car God drives."

And we were all like, "Really?

God drives a car?"

He says, "Do you remember in Isaiah 6, and it says that God was high and lifted up?"

We was like, "Yeah."

He said, "That's because he rides a Navigator."

[ Laughs ] -God doesn't have to fly around, because that would just be showing off.

You know, he takes the jeep like we would.

-The jeep is an all-terrain type of vehicle.

It's one that would get him anywhere.

-It relates back to the nature part of it.

When you are in nature, you don't want to be in a sedan.

You want to be in a jeep so you can be, you know, be able to be rugged.

-One thing, too, is you notice that he didn't drive an automatic.

He wanted to shift.

-Further into this poem, it says he downshifts.

-Driving a stick shift really requires the driver and the vehicle to be one.

So it feels so fitting that God is driving a stick shift.

-Other readers have pointed out that he drives a stick.

-Of course.

-So tell us why God has to drive a stick.

-Oh, God is so cool.

♪♪ -It's blinded.

The word "bloodied" really, like, it created a image for me.

-It's all bloodied and messed up from the -- from the hog trap.

It wasn't supposed to catch the buck.

-We could go to the image of the binding of Isaac, where Abraham is supposed to sacrifice his own son.

Thank God, God saves Isaac from that.

-The Bible says that there was a ram caught in the thicket.

Abraham reaches out to save his son by transferring the ram in the place of his son.

-God says, "Sacrifice your son."

You know, just as he sent his Son Jesus Christ down to save the world.

-To me, that speaks of God as one who rescues us, who delivers us.

-God also got to experience the relief a human feels when something good happens or when something is staved off.

It's like, "Thank God."

-Thank God.

-Thank God.

-Thank God.

-Thank God.

It's kind of like God is smart.

"Oh, I can do this.

Thank God I can do this," in a way.

"I have that power."

-Thank God.

[ Laughs ] -[ Laughs ] I was like, what?

That's just genius.

It's so totally fraught with a combination of sarcasm and deep faith.

♪♪ ♪♪ We spend a lot of time out in the Big Bend.

And the main feature of that whole place is geology dwarfing your whole mind, your whole perspective.

You're looking at this... "Wow!

How long did that take?"

-The time unit, last May, is meant to give us a grounding.

'Cause, like, we feel like, "Oh, it's just last May."

So that's last year, and that's something -- I can recognize the urgency of that, which I think is also part of what happens in Genesis.

It was evening, it was morning, the first day.

Here's a tangible time unit that I can wrap my mind around.

All of this is to help us have language and thought for an experience that is so beyond us.

-While the poem takes us back to the very beginning by contracting vast swaths of time, it also brings us into the present.

-I thought of global warming and how our world is changing because of global warming.

-We're in an accelerated relationship to geological time now with a upheaval of weather and the scale of disaster.

Maybe that's what that radical shift in, "Oh, it was only just recently that that happened."

♪♪ ♪♪ -It is metaphorical and it is literal.

They are real landscapes that the poet sees.

And it is also a manifestation of God's creation.

And there's death.

-God created the coyotes.

[ Laughs ] -There's conflict and tension in that space.

Animals are preying upon one another, and the elements are, you know, undoing all the growing and the life that wants to take root.

♪♪ -"The caracaras stalking carcasses."

There's life and death in that line.

-The buck caught in the trap.

That's just awful.

But then all of a sudden... "Tiny flowers throwing frantic color at his feet."

♪♪ -"A pair of dragonflies mates in flight."

What God can see is, like, new beings being created.

Dragonflies mating in flight.

It's just such a beautiful image of life.

-We have these two dragonflies mating, which is so divine.

And the flowers "throw frantic color."

It's as if they're celebrating, right?

They're a part of God experiencing the world.

It's like, "Hello!"

♪♪ -Every time I read this poem, I like it better 'cause I find little twists and turns in it all the way through it.

♪♪ -The twists and turns of blank verse provided the Romantic poet William Wordsworth the perfect vehicle to lead him into the spiritual heart of nature.

-The large space that Wordsworth opened for me as a young reader of poetry and to think, "Oh!

It's philosophy."

-For Wordsworth, the movement of the imagination through nature is movement toward the divine.

-I don't necessarily feel like my relationship with the Old Testament is what my Sunday School teachers intended it to be, but it's in there.

And so my wrestling with space, time, place, death, silence, questions, doubt... um, is a kind of theology, I think.

[ Women singing ] -"If he tries -- if he holds his mind in place and wills it -- he can almost believe in something larger than himself rearranging the air."

[ Women singing ] -What would it mean not to be the bearded, omniscient figure, but to be searching?

-I don't know, man.

This is deep.

He's got a cabin... "where he goes to be alone with his questions."

So he has questions.

-I was taught growing up God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful.

But to know that God Himself takes time to Himself to just think is just, like, astonishing.

-It made me scratch my head a few times because of that understanding that I've always had -- God has all the answers.

I'm the one with the questions.

♪♪ -"If he tries -- if he holds his mind in place and wills it -- he can almost believe in something larger than himself rearranging the air."

She's imagining a God that is imagining.

So there's, like, a Mobius strip of thought.

♪♪ -Is this God seeking God, not realizing that it is God itself?

-The poem, if it's succeeding, in some way, should bring you into the part of yourself where that type of thought process is possible.

♪♪ -"He squints at the jeep glaring in bright sun.

Stares a while at patterns the tall branches cast onto the undersides of leaves.

Then God climbs back into the cab, returning to everywhere."

[ Choir singing ] -At the end of the poem, it surprises me.

He returns to everywhere.

I mean, he's not going just to one place.

Because God is everywhere.

-The part that is mind-blowing for me is that God stepped out of everywhere.

-How do you leave everywhere?

How do you leave everywhere to return to everywhere?

Everywhere is everywhere.

[ Choir singing ] ♪♪ -I feel a loneliness that he has to go back to everywhere.

♪♪ -There is a beautiful midrash rabbinic teaching that says that God created human beings because God felt really alone, that God was like, "Oh.

To have this world all for me?"

-I think he's craving the human experience.

It's almost like he's putting his feet into the shoes of humans.

-When he comes down, the first thing he does, he goes to the manmade structure.

-Referencing the cabin like God has to have a dwelling place, you know?

♪♪ -Windows down.

Wind blowing across your face.

There's some level of joy.

[ Choir singing ] -"He can almost believe in something larger than himself."

I think that's the human need, which is reflected here in God's need to... to find something more and to be a part of something greater.

-♪ I lift my hands ♪ ♪ In total praise ♪ ♪ To You ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ah ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ah ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪