NEW COLLECTED POEMS

Wendell Berry

NEW COLLECTED

POEMS

Wendell Berry

Copyright © Wendell Berry 2012

All rights reserved under International and

Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-6190-2047-4

Cover design by Gerilyn Attebery

Interior design by David Bullen

COUNTER POINT

1919 Fifth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TO TANYA, AS BEFORE

Contents

Preface: The Country of Déja Vu

THE BROKEN GROUND (1964)

Elegy

Observance

Boone

Green and White

A Man Walking and Singing

The Companions

The Aristocracy

The Bird Killer

An Architecture

Canticle

Sparrow

A Music

To Go By Singing

The Wild

May Song

The Fear of Darkness

The Plan

The Guest

The Thief

The Broken Ground

FINDINGS (1969)

The Design of the House: Ideal and Hard Time

The Handing Down

Three Elegiac Poems

OPENINGS (1968)

The Thought of Something Else

My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves

October 10

The Snake

The Cold

To My Children, Fearing for Them

The Winter Rain

March Snow

April Woods: Morning

The Finches

The Porch over the River

Before Dark

The Dream

The Sycamore

The Meadow

Against the War in Vietnam

Dark with Power

In Memory: Stuart Egnal

The Want of Peace

The Peace of Wild Things

Grace

To Think of the Life of a Man

Marriage

Do Not Be Ashamed

Window Poems

To a Siberian Woodsman

A Discipline

A Poem of Thanks

Envoy

FARMING: A HAND BOOK (1970)

The Man Born to Farming

The Stones

The Supplanting

Sowing

The Familiar

The Farmer Among the Tombs

For the Rebuilding of a House

The Springs

Rain

Sleep

To Know the Dark

Winter Night Poem for Mary

Winter Nightfall

February 2, 1968

March 22, 1968

The Morning’s News

Enriching the Earth

A Wet Time

The Silence

In This World

The New Roof

A Praise

On the Hill Late at Night

The Seeds

The Wish to Be Generous

Air and Fire

The Lilies

Independence Day

A Standing Ground

Song in a Year of Catastrophe

The Current

The Mad Farmer Revolution

The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

The Farmer and the Sea

Earth and Fire

The Mad Farmer in the City

The Birth (Near Port William)

Awake at Night

Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer

The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer

Meditation in the Spring Rain

The Grandmother

The Heron

September 2, 1969

The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments

The Sorrel Filly

To the Unseeable Animal

THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGE (1973)

The Old Elm Tree by the River

Poem

Breaking

The Country of Marriage

Prayer after Eating

Her First Calf

Kentucky River Junction

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

A Marriage, an Elegy

The Arrival

A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall

The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment

Planting Trees

The Wild Geese

The Silence

Anger Against Beasts

At a Country Funeral

The Recognition

Planting Crocuses

Praise

The Gathering

A Homecoming

The Mad Farmer’s Love Song

Testament

The Clear Days

Song

Poem for J.

The Long Hunter

An Anniversary

CLEARING (1977)

History

Where

The Clearing

Work Song

From the Crest

A PART (1980)

Stay Home

To Gary Snyder

For the Hog Killing

Goods

The Adze

The Cold Pane

Falling Asleep

A Purification

A Dance

The Fear of Love

Seventeen Years

To What Listens

Woods

The Lilies

Forty Years

A Meeting

Another Descent

Below

The Star

The Hidden Singer

The Necessity of Faith

To the Holy Spirit

Ripening

The Way of Pain

We Who Prayed and Wept

Grief

Fall

An Autumn Burning

A Warning to My Readers

Creation Myth

The First

Walking on the River Ice

Throwing Away the Mail

Except

For the Future

Traveling at Home

July, 1773

The Slip

Horses

THE WHEEL (1982)

Requiem

Elegy

Rising

Desolation

The Strait

The Law That Marries All Things

Setting Out

Song (1)

From the Distance

Letter

Returning

To Tanya at Christmas

Song (2)

The River Bridged and Forgot

The Gift of Gravity

Song (3)

The Wheel

The Dance

Passing the Strait

Our Children, Coming of Age

Song (4)

In Rain

ENTRIES (1994)

For the Explainers

A Marriage Song

Voices Late at Night

The Record

A Parting

One of Us

Thirty More Years

The Wild Rose

The Blue Robe

The Venus of Botticelli

In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Dr. Williams

To My Mother

On a Theme of Chaucer

The Reassurer

Let Us Pledge

The Vacation

A Lover’s Song

Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men

Air

The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union

Duality

The Three

To Hayden Carruth

Noguchi Fountain

Spring

Imagination

For an Absence

The Storm

In Extremis: Poems about My Father

Epitaph

Come Forth

GIVEN (2005)

Dust

In a Country Once Forested

To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday

They

Cathedral

Dante

The Millennium

June Wind

Why

The Rejected Husband

The Inlet

Listen!

In Art Rowanberry’s Barn

Burley Coulter’s Song for Kate Helen Branch

How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)

Words

To a Writer of Reputation

Seventy Years

A Passing Thought

The Leader

The Ongoing Holy War Against Evil

Some Further Words

Lysimachia Nummularia

LEAVINGS (2010)

Like Snow

On the Theory of the Big Bang as the Origin of the Universe

Look It Over

A Letter (to Ed McClanahan)

A Letter (to my brother)

A Letter (to Hayden Carruth)

A Letter (to Ernest J. Gaines)

Give It Time

Questionnaire

And I Beg Your Pardon

David Jones

Tu Fu

A Speech to the Garden Club of America (With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe)

While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and BigBangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row

Men Untrained to Comfort

Over the Edge

Index of Titles and First Lines

The Country of Déjà Vu

My old poems—I liked them all

well enough when they were new.

They came through the air, I wrote them down,

and sent them on, as also I fed

the birds who descended here to eat

as they were passing through. Now

I’m asked to read those poems again.

What for? They all are from the Country

of Déjà Vu, which is where

I have no need to go back to.

THE BROKEN GROUND

(1964)

For my mother and father

ELEGY

Pryor Thomas Berry

March 4, 1864 – February 23, 1946

I.

All day our eyes could find no resting place.

Over a flood of snow sight came back

Empty to the mind. The sun

In a shutter of clouds, light

Staggered down the fall of snow.

All circling surfaces of earth were white.

No shape or shadow moved the flight

Of winter birds. Snow held the earth its silence.

We could pick no birdsong from the wind.

At nightfall our father turned his eyes away.

It was this storm of silence shook out his ghost.

2.

We sleep; he only wakes

Who is unshapen in a night of snow.

His shadow in the shadow of the earth

Moves the dark to wholeness.

We wait beside his body here, his image

Shape of silence in the room.

3.

Sifting

Down the wind, the winter rain

Spirals about the town

And the church hill’s jut of stones.

Under the mounds, below

The weather’s moving, the numb dead know

No fitfulness of wind.

On the road that in his knowledge ends

We bear our father to the earth.

We have adorned the shuck of him

With flowers as for a bridal, burned

Lamps about him, held death apart

Until the grave should mound it whole.

Behind us rain breaks the corners

Of our father’s house, quickens

On the downslope to noise.

Our steps

Clamor in his silence, who tracked

The sun to autumn in the dust.

Below the hill

The river bears the rain away, that cut

His fields their shape and stood them dry.

Water wearing the earth

Is the shape of the earth,

The river flattening in its bends.

Their mingling held

Ponderable in his words—

Knowledge polished on a stone.

4.

River and earth and sun and wind disjoint,

Over his silence flow apart. His words

Are sharp to memory as cold rain

But are not ours.

We stare dumb

Upon the fulcrum dust, across which death

Lifts up our love. There is no more to add

To this perfection. We turn away

Into the shadow of his death.

Time in blossom and fruit and seed,

Time in the dust huddles in his darkness.

The world, spun in its shadow, holds all.

Until the morning comes his death is ours.

Until morning comes say of the blind bird:

His feet are netted with darkness, or he flies

His heart’s distance in the darkness of his eyes.

A season’s sun will light him no tree green.

5.

Spring tangles shadow and light,

Branches of trees

Knit vision and wind.

The shape of the wind is a tree

Bending, spilling its birds.

From the cloud to the stone

The rain stands tall,

Columned into his darkness.

The church hill heals our father in.

Our remembering moves from a different place.

OBSERVANCE

The god of the river leans

against the shore in the early

morning, resting from his caprices;

the gentle sun parades

on his runneled gaze—he devotes

himself to watching it as one

devotes oneself to sleep;

the light becomes

his consciousness, warming him.

The river clears after the winter

floods; the slopes of the hills renew

the sun, diaphanous flower and leaf, blue-green

with distance;

this idle god dallies

in his shade, his mind adorned with stones.

At the river’s edge there is singing;

the townsmen have come down from their sleep,

their singing silences the birds;

they sing renewal beyond irreparable

divisions.

The god did not expect

these worshippers, but he hears

them singing, briefly as reeds

grown up by the water;

they go

away, the river re-enters

their silence

—and he watches

a white towboat approach, shoving

its rust-colored island of barges,

the sound of its engines filling his mind

and draining out;

the forked wake

wrinkles on his vision, pointing

to the corner of his eye,

and floats away;

the holiday fishermen

arrive—

a man and his wife

establish themselves on a sandbar, bringing

lunch in a basket, blankets, tackle

down the path through the young

horseweeds;

the woman smooths

a blanket on the sand, and begins

a ponderous sunbath, her eyes

covered, her skirt hoisted

above her knees;

the man

casts a baited line downstream

and uncaps a beer:

the god observes;

these are the sundry

objects of his thought.

He has watched the passing

of other boats, assemblages,

seasons, inundations,

boatmen

whose voyages bore down the currents

to the dark shores of their eyes

—and has forgotten them, innocent

of his seasonal wraths, his mischiefs

accomplished and portending, as his present

forbearance is innocent;

the perfection

of his forgetting allows the sun

to glitter

—the light

flows away, its blue and white

peeling off the green waves.

His mind contains

the river as its banks

constrain it, in a single act

receiving it and letting it go.

BOONE

Beyond this final house

I’ll make no journeys, that is

the nature of this place,

I came here old; the house contains

the shade of its walls,

a fire in winter; I know

from what direction to expect the wind;

still

I move in the descent

of days from what was dreamed

to what remains.

In the stillness of this single place

where I’m resigned to die

I’m not free of journeys:

one eye watches while the other sleeps

—every day is a day’s remove

from what I knew.

We held a country in our minds

which, unpossessed, allowed

the encroachment of our dreams;

our vision descended like doves

at morning on valleys still blue

in the extremity of hills

until we moved in a prodigy of reckonings,

sustaining in the toil of a journey

the rarity of our desire.

We came there at the end of spring,

climbing out of the hill’s shadow

in the evening,

the light

leaned quiet on the trees,

we’d foreseen no words;

after nightfall when the coals of our fire

contained all that was left

of vision, my journey relinquished me

to sleep;

kindling in the uneasy

darkness where we

broached our coming to the place we’d dreamed

the dying green of those valleys

began to live.

My passage grew into that country

like a vine, as if remaining

when I’d gone, responsive to the season’s

change, boding a continuance of eyes;

not the place or the distance

made it known to me,

but the direction so ardently obeyed,

preserving my advance

on the edge of virgin light,

broken by my shadow’s stride;

I wouldn’t recognize the way back.

I approach my death, descend

toward the last fact; it is

not so clear to me now as it once seemed;

when I hunted in the new lands

alone, I could foresee

the skeleton hiding with its wound

after the fear and flesh were gone;

now

it may come as a part of sleep.

In winter the river hides its flowing under the ice

—even then it flows,

bearing interminably down; the black crow flies

into the black night;

the bones of the old dead ache for the house fires.

Death is a conjecture of the seed

and the seasons bear it out;

the wild plum achieves its bloom,

perfects the yellow center of each flower,

submits to violence—

extravagance too grievous for praise;

there are no culminations, no

requitals.

Freed of distances

and dreams, about to die,

the mind turns back to its approaches:

what else have I known?

The search

withholds the joy from what is found,

that has been my sorrow;

love is no more than what remains

of itself.

There are no arrivals.

At the coming of winter

the birds obey the leviathan flock

that moves them south,

a rhythm of the blood that survives the cold

in pursuit of summer;

and the sun, innocent of time

as the blossom is innocent of ripeness,

faithful to solstice, returns—

and the flocks return;

the season recognizes them.

If it were possible now

I’d make myself submissive

to the weather

as an old tree, without retrospect

of winter, blossoming,

grateful for summers hatched from thrushes’ eggs

in the speckled thickets

—obedient

to darkness,

be innocent of my dying.

GREEN AND WHITE

The wind scruffing it, the bay

is like a field of green grass,

and the white seagulls afloat

in the hackling of the green bay

are like white flowers blooming

in the field,

for they are white

and come there, and are still

a while, and leave, and leaving

leave no sign they ever were there.

Green is no memorial to white.

There’s danger in it. They fly

beyond idea till they come back.

A MAN WALKING AND SINGING

for James Baker Hall

1.

It is no longer necessary to sleep

in order to dream of our destruction.

We take form within our death, the figures

emerging like shadows in fire.

Who is it? speaking to me of death’s beauty.

I think it is my own black angel, as near me

as my flesh. I am never divided from his darkness,

his face the black mask of my face. My eyes

live in his black eye-holes. On his black wings

I rise to sing.

His mouthing presences attend

my singing:

Die more lightly than live,

they say. Death is more gay.

There’s no argument

against its certainty, at least, they say.

I know they know as surely as I live my death

exists, and has my shape.

2.

But the man so forcefully walking,

say where he goes,

say what he hears and what he sees

and what he knows

to cause him to stride so merrily.

He goes in spring

through the evening street

to buy bread,

green trees leaning

over the sidewalk,

forsythia yellow

beneath the windows,

birds singing

as birds sing

only in spring,

and he sings, his footsteps

beating the measure of his song.

In an open window

a man and a woman

leaning together

at the room’s center

embrace and kiss

as if they met

in passing,

the spring wind

lifting the curtain.

His footsteps carry him

past the window,

deeper into his song.

His singing becomes conglomerate

of all he sees,

leaving the street behind him

runged as a ladder

or the staff of a song.

3.

To his death? Yes.

He walks and sings to his death.

And winter will equal spring.

And for the lovers, even

while they kiss, even though

it is spring, the day ends.

But to the sound of his passing

he sings. It is a kind of triumph

that he grieves—thinking

of the white lilacs in bloom,

profuse, fragrant, white

in excess of all seasonal need,

and of the mockingbird’s crooked

arrogant notes, hooking him to the sky

as though no flight

or dying could equal him

at his momentary song.

THE COMPANIONS

When he goes out in the morning

and comes back at night

his landlady is there

watching him, leaning

forward in her chair, one hand

holding the curtain back,

simply curious, simply old,

having stashed away her knickknacks

in three commemorative rooms,

stored up a winter’s breathing,

forbidden the cold

to come in. She dreams

she’s dying in her sleep

and wakes up afraid, to breath in

again her breathed-out breath.

Who will outlast?

She waits for him, faithful

to his arrivals and to the place;

he brings back life to her,

what he salvages of himself daily

from the shut-out air.

They don’t speak.

She just observes his homecoming,

lifelike in her chair

as the shell of a wan moth

holding to the lace.

THE ARISTOCRACY

Paradise might have appeared here,

surprising us, a rackle of sublime coordinates

figuring over the trees, surprising us, even

though the look of the place seems not

altogether unexpectant of such an advent,

seems not altogether willing to settle

for something less: the fine light

prepared in the taut statuary of the oaks;

venerable churches of muted brick;

Greek porches presiding at the ends

of approaches; delicate fanlights over doorways

delicate and symmetrical as air, if air

prepared, preened itself for Paradise

to appear, surprisingly, but not very, in this place

—all it needs to be Paradise is populace.

(What has appeared, surprisingly, but not very

—stepping out the door, and down the steps,

groping for each next-lower step

with a left foot her expansive exquisitely garmented

paunch has prevented her seeing for thirty-five

years—is a rich, fat, selfish,

ugly, ignorant, old

bitch, airing her cat.)

THE BIRD KILLER

His enemy, the universe, surrounds him nightly with stars

going nowhere over the cold woods that has grown now,

with nightfall, totally dark, the stars deeper in the sky

than darkness; his thoughts go out alone into the winds

of the woods’ dark. He sits in the doorway and softly

plays the guitar; his fingers are stiff and heavy

and touch the strings, not dextrously, so that he plays

his own song, no true copy of a tune; sometimes the notes

go away from melody, form singly, and die out,

singly, in the hollow of the instrument, like single small

lights in the dark; his music has this passion,

that he plays as he can play. All day he has walked

in the woods with his gun, ruin of summer, iron-rust,

crumpled bronze, under the bare trees, devouring song. Now

the trees of darkness grow tall and wide; nobody’s

silence is in the woods. In the hush of all birds

who love light, he lets go free to die in the broad woods

in the dark the notes of his song.

AN ARCHITECTURE

Like a room, the clear stanza

of birdsong opens among the noises

of motors and breakfasts.

Among the light’s beginnings,

lifting broken gray of the night’s

end, the bird hastens to his song

as to a place, a room commenced

at the end of sleep. Around

him his singing is entire.

CANTICLE

for Robert Hazel

What death means is not this—

the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall,

praising its absence, feeding on music.

If life can’t justify and explain itself,

death can’t justify and explain it.

A creed and a grave never did equal the life

of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts

of ancient stones at the beginning of April.

The black clothes of the priests are turned

against the frail yellow of sunlight and petal;

they wait in their blackness to earn joy

by dying. They trust that nothing holy is free,

and so their lives are paid. Money slots

in the altar rails make a jukebox of the world,

the mind paying its gnawed coins for the safety of ignorance.

SPARROW

A sparrow is

his hunger organized.

Filled, he flies

before he knows he’s going to.

And he dies by the

same movement: filled

with himself, he goes

by the eye-quick

reflex of his flesh

out of sight,

leaving his perfect

absence without a thought.

A MUSIC

I employ the blind mandolin player

in the tunnel of the Métro. I pay him

a coin as hard as his notes,

and maybe he has employed me, and pays me

with his playing to hear him play.

Maybe we’re necessary to each other,

and this vacant place has need of us both

—it’s vacant, I mean, of dwellers,

is populated by passages and absences.

By some fate or knack he has chosen

to place his music in this cavity

where there’s nothing to look at

and blindness costs him nothing.

Nothing was here before he came.

His music goes out among the sounds

of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance

and meaning of what he plays.

It’s his music, not the place, I go by.

In this light which is just a fact, like darkness

or the edge or end of what you may be

going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees

and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up

his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

his fingers make their pattern on the wires.

This is not the pursuing rhythm

of a blind cane pecking in the sun,

but is a singing in a dark place.

TO GO BY SINGING

He comes along the street, singing,

a rag of a man, with his game foot and bum’s clothes.

He’s asking for nothing—his hands

aren’t even held out. His song

is the gift of singing, to him

and to all who will listen.

To hear him, you’d think the engines

would all stop, and the flower vendor would stand

with her hands full of flowers and not move.

You’d think somebody would have hired him

and provided him a clean quiet stage to sing on.

But there’s no special occasion or place

for his singing—that’s why it needs

to be strong. His song doesn’t impede the morning

or change it, except by freely adding itself.

THE WILD

In the empty lot—a place

not natural, but wild—among

the trash of human absence,

the slough and shamble

of the city’s seasons, a few

old locusts bloom.

A few woods birds

fly and sing

in the new foliage

—warblers and tanagers, birds

wild as leaves; in a million

each one would be rare,

new to the eyes. A man

couldn’t make a habit

of such color,

such flight and singing.

But they’re the habit of this

wasted place. In them

the ground is wise. They are

its remembrance of what it is.

MAY SONG

For whatever is let go

there’s a taker.

The living discovers itself

where no preparation

was made for it,

where its only privilege

is to live if it can.

The window flies from the dark

of the subway mouth

into the sunlight

stained with the green

of the spring weeds

that crowd the improbable

black earth

of the embankment,

their stout leaves

like the tongues and bodies

of a herd, feeding

on the new heat,

drinking at the seepage

of the stones:

the freehold of life,

triumphant

even in the waste

of those who possess it.

But it is itself the possessor,

we know at last,

seeing it send out weeds

to take back

whatever is left:

Proprietor, pasturing foliage

on the rubble,

making use

of the useless—a beauty

we have less than not

deserved.

THE FEAR OF DARKNESS

The tall marigolds darken.

The baby cries

for better reasons than it knows.

The young wife walks

and walks among the shadows

meshed in the rooms.

And he sits in the doorway,

looking toward the woods,

long after the stars come out.

He feels the slow

sky turn toward him, and wait.

His birthright

is a third-hand Chevrolet,

bought for too much. “I

floorboard the son of a bitch,

and let her go.”

THE PLAN

My old friend, the owner

of a new boat, stops by

to ask me to fish with him,

and I say I will—both of us

knowing that we may never

get around to it, it may be

years before we’re both

idle again on the same day.

But we make a plan, anyhow,

in honor of friendship

and the fine spring weather

and the new boat

and our sudden thought

of the water shining

under the morning fog.

THE GUEST

Washed into the doorway

by the wake of the traffic,

he wears humanity

like a third-hand shirt

—blackened with enough

of Manhattan’s dirt to sprout

a tree, or poison one.

His empty hand has led him

where he has come to.

Our differences claim us.

He holds out his hand,

in need of all that’s mine.

And so we’re joined, as deep

as son and father. His life

is offered me to choose.

Shall I begin servitude

to him? Let this cup pass.

Who am I? But charity must

suppose, knowing no better,

that this is a man fallen

among thieves, or come

to this strait by no fault

—that our difference

is not a judgment,

though I can afford to eat

and am made his judge.

I am, I nearly believe,

the Samaritan who fell

into the ambush of his heart

on the way to another place.

My stranger waits, his hand

held out like something to read,

as though its emptiness

is an accomplishment.

I give him a smoke and the price

of a meal, no more

—not sufficient kindness

or believable sham.

I paid him to remain strange

to my threshold and table,

to permit me to forget him—

knowing I won’t. He’s the guest

of my knowing, though not asked.

THE THIEF

I think of us lying asleep,

eyes and hands filled with the dark,

when the arm of the night

entered, reaching into the pockets

of our empty clothes. We slept

in the element of that power,

innocent of it, preserved from it

not even by our wish.

As though not born, we were carried

beyond an imminence we did not

waken to, as passively as stars

are carried beyond their spent

shining—our eyes granted to the light

again, by what chance or price

we do not even know.

THE BROKEN GROUND

The opening out and out,

body yielding body:

the breaking

through which the new

comes, perching

above its shadow

on the piling up

darkened broken old

husks of itself:

bud opening to flower

opening to fruit opening

to the sweet marrow

of the seed—

taken

from what was, from

what could have been.

What is left

is what is.

FINDINGS

(1969)

THE DESIGN OF THE HOUSE:

IDEAL AND HARD TIME

1.

Except in idea, perfection is as wild

as light; there is no hand laid on it.

But the house is a shambles

unless the vision of its perfection

upholds it like stone.

More probable: the ideal

of its destruction:

cloud of fire prefiguring

its disappearance.

What value there is

is assumed;

like a god, the house elects its omens;

because it is, I desire it should be

—white, its life intact in it,

among trees.

Love has conceived a house,

and out of its labor

brought forth its likeness

—the emblem of desire, continuing

though the flesh falls away.

2.

We’ve come round again

to short days and long nights;

time goes;

the clocks barely keep up;

a spare dream of summer

is kept

alive in the house:

the Queen Anne’s lace

—gobletted,

green beginning to bloom,

tufted, upfurling—

unfolding

whiteness:

in this winter’s memory

more clear than ever in summer,

cold paring away excess:

the single blooming random

in the summer’s abundance

of its kind, in high relief

above the clover and grass

of the field, unstill

an instant,

the day having come upon it,

green and white

in as much light as ever was.

Opened, white, at the solstice

of its becoming, then the flower

forgets its growing;

is still;

dirt is its paradigm—

and this memory’s seeing,

a cold wind keening the outline.

3.

Winter nights the house sleeps,

a dry seedhead in the snow

falling and fallen, the white

and dark and depth of it, continuing

slow impact of silence.

The dark

rooms hold our heads on pillows, waiting

day, through the snow falling and fallen

in the darkness between inconsecutive

dreams. The brain burrows in its earth

and sleeps,

trusting dawn, though the sun’s

light is a light without precedent, never

proved ahead of its coming, waited for

by the law that hope has made it.

4.

What do you intend?

Drink blood

and speak, old ghosts. I don’t

hear you. What has it amounted to

—the unnegotiable accumulation

of your tears? Your expenditure

has purchased no reprieve. Your

failed wisdom shards among the

down-going atoms of the moment.

History goes blind and in darkness;

neither sees nor is seen, nor is

known except as a carrion

marked with unintelligible wounds:

dragging its dead body, living,

yet to be born, it moves heavily

to its glories. It tramples

the little towns, forgets their names.

5.

If reason was all, reason

would not exist—the will

to reason accounts for it;

it’s not reason that chooses

to live; the seed doesn’t swell

in its husk by reason, but loves

itself, obeys light which is

its own thought and argues the leaf

in secret; love articulates

the choice of life in fact; life

chooses life because it is

alive; what lives didn’t begin dead,

nor sun’s fire commence in ember.

Love foresees a jointure

composing a house, a marriage

of contraries, compendium

of opposites in equilibrium.

This morning the sun

came up before the moon set;

shadows were stripped from the house

like burnt rags, the sky turning

blue behind the clear moon,

day and night moving to day.

Let severances be as dividing

budleaves around the flower

—woman and child enfolded, chosen.

It’s a dying begun, not lightly,

the taking up of this love

whose legacy is its death.

6.

This is a love poem for you, Tanya—

among wars, among the brutal forfeitures

of time, in this house, among its latent fires,

among all that honesty must see, I accept

your dying, and love you: nothing mitigates

—and for our Mary, chosen by the blind

hungering of our blood, precious and periled

in her happy mornings; whose tears are mine.

7.

There’s still a degree of sleep

recalls

the vast empty dream I slept in

as a child

sometimes contained a chaos, tangled

like fishline snarled in hooks—

sometimes a hook, whetted, severe,

drawing

the barbed darkness to a point;

sometimes I seemed merely to be falling.

The house, also, has taken shape in it.

8.

And I have dreamed

of the morning coming in

like a bird through the window

not burdened by a thought,

the light a singing

as I hoped.

It comes in and sings

on the corner of the white washstand,

among coleus stems and roots

in a clear green bottle

on the black tabletop

beneath the window,

under the purple coleus leaves,

among spearing

green philodendron leaves,

on the white washstand:

a small yellow bird with black wings,

darting in and out.

9.

To imagine the thoughtlessness

of a thoughtless thing

is useless.

The mind must sing

of itself to keep awake.

Love has visualized a house,

and out of its expenditure

fleshed the design

at this cross ways

of consciousness and time:

its form is growth

come to light in it;

croplands, gardens,

are of its architecture,

labor its realization;

solstice is the height

of its consciousness,

thicket a figuration

of its waking;

plants and stars are made convergent

in its windows;

cities we have gone to and come back

are the prospect of its doorways.

And there’s a city it dreams of:

salt-white beside the water.

10.

Waking comes into sleep like a dream:

violet dawn over the snow, the black trees.

Snow and the house’s white make a white

the black swifts may come back to.

THE HANDING DOWN

1. The light

The mind is the continuity

of its objects, and the coherence

of its objects—the

understanding of each

one thing by the

intelligence of an assemblage.

It is the effort of design

to triumph over the imperfections

of the parts—

the old man’s gathering of memories

toward this morning’s windows

and pipe and talk, the road

and housefronts all his years

have come by, the squash blooms

of this summer’s garden.

The mind falsifies its objects

by inattention. Indirection

is its debasement of what it loves.

It is not given proof

that it is true. It is blind

at the beginning and at the end.

It is the illumination of a passage,

no more.

2. The conversation

Speaker and hearer, words

making a passage between them,

begin a community.

Two minds

in succession, grandfather

and grandson, they sit and talk

on the enclosed porch,

looking out at the town, which

recalls itself in their talk

and is carried forward.

Their conversation has

no pattern of its own,

but alludes casually

to a shaped knowledge

in the minds of the two men

who love each other.

The quietness of knowing in common

is half of it. Silences come into it

easily, and break it

while the old man thinks

or concentrates on his pipe

and the strong smoke

climbs over the brim of his hat.

He has lived a long time.

He has seen the changes of times

and grown used to the world

again. Having been wakeful so long,

the loser of so many years,

his mind moves back and forth,

sorting and counting,

among all he knows.

His memory has become huge,

and surrounds him,

and fills his silences.

He lifts his head

and speaks of an old day

that amuses him or grieves him

or both.

Under the windows opposite them

there’s a long table loaded

with potted plants, the foliage

staining and shadowing the daylight

as it comes in.

3. The old man is older in history than in time

“I’ve lived in two countries

in my life

and never moved.”

He has spoken of the steamboats

of his boyhood, the whistles

still clear to him

in the upriver bends,

coming down to the landings

now disappeared, their names

less spoken every year.

He has remembered the open days

of that first country

—“It was free here

when I was a boy”—and the old

brutalities and sorrows.

And now they talk of power

and politics and war, agonies

now, and to come,

deaths never imagined

by the old man’s generation.

The mistakes of the old

become the terrors of the young.

In the face of his grandson he sees

something of himself, going on.

Moved by the near suffering

of other men, he has taken them

into the body of his thought.

“If I died now, I wouldn’t lose

much. It’s you young ones

I worry about.”

4. He looks out the window at the town

Beyond the windows, past the fern

and the pot rims and the patterned

vine leaves, and the trees

in the yard, are the white housefronts

and storefronts of the little town,

facing the road. There are only

the two directions: coming in

and going out. And all

who take one take both.

The town, “port of entry

and departure for the bodies

as well as the souls of men,”

aspires to the greatness of the greatest

city of the mind—with its dead

for baggage. It suffers its dead beside it

under the particular grass, the summary stone.

Their hill keeps a silence into which

the live town speaks a little.

They are the town’s shut record, all

their complexity perished—victims

of epidemics, meanness, foolishness,

heredity, war, recklessness, chance,

pride, time. None ever escaped.

That is the history of the place.

The town, its white walls

gleaming among black

shadows and green leaves,

stands on the surface of the eye.

And the town’s history is the eye’s

depth and recognition—is the mind’s

discovery of itself in its place

in a new morning.

5. He has lived through another night

He begins the knowledge

of the sun’s absence.

He’s likely to wake up

any hour of the night

out of his light sleep

to know—with clarity like

the touch of hands in the dark—

the stillness of the room.

The silence

stretches over the town

like a black tent, whose hem

the headstones weight.

Into it come, now

and again, hard footsteps

on the road, remote

sudden voices, and then

a car coming in, or

going out, the headlights

levering the window’s

image around the walls.

And he considers the size

of his life, lying in it there,

looking up out of it

into the darkness,

the transparence of all

his old years between him

and the darkness.

Before it’s light

the birds waken, and begin

singing in the dark trees

around the house, among the leaves

over the dampened roofs

of the still town

and in the country thickets

for miles. Their voices

reach to the end of the dark.

6. The new house

At the foot of his long shadow

he walked across the town

early in the morning

to watch the carpenters at work

on a new house. The saws released

the warm pine-smell into the air

—the scent of time to come, freshly

opened. He was comforted by that,

and by the new unblemished wood.

That time goes, making

the jointures of households, for better

or worse, is no comfort.

That, for the men and women

still to be born, time is coming

is a comfort of sorts.

That there’s a little of the good

left over from a few lives

is a comfort of sorts.

He has grown eager

in his love for the good dead

and all the unborn.

That failed hope

doesn’t prove the failure of hope

is a comfort of sorts.

Grown old and wise, he takes

what comfort he can get, as gladly as once

he’d have taken the comfort he wished for.

For a man knowing evil—how surely

it grows up in any ground and makes seed—

the building of a house is a craft indeed.

7. The heaviness of his wisdom

The incredible happens, he knows.

The worst possibilities are real.

The terrible justifies

his dread of it. He knows winter

despondences, the mind inundated

by its excrement, hope gone

and not remembered.

And he knows vernal transfigurations,

the sentence in the stems of trees

noisy with old memory made new,

troubled with the seed

of the being of what has not been.

He trusts the changes of the sun and air:

dung and carrion made earth,

richness that forgets what it was.

He knows, if he can hold out

long enough, the good

is given its chance.

He has dreamed of a town

fit for the abiding of souls

and bodies that might live forever.

He has seen it as in a far-off

white and gold evening

of summer, the black flight

of swifts turning above it

in the air. There’s a clarity

in which he has not become clear,

his body dragging a shadow,

half hidden in it.

8. A wilderness starts toward him

The old man lives on

among sheds and tools

he won’t use again, places

he won’t go back to.

Around the place his living

has kept clear there’s a wilderness

waiting for him to go.

In the wooded creek vales

of his memory, that his mind

opens slowly to become, all is

as it was, and must be,

the water thrush’s note chinks

like dropping water

over the rocks. To old fields

and croplands the persistent

anachronism of wilderness

returns, oaks deepen in the hill,

their branches mesh,

into the pocketed shadows

slowly as rocks wear

the moss comes.

Behind him, as if imagined

before his birth, he leaves

silence no one has yet broken.

Ahead of him he sees, as in an old

forefather’s prophetic dream,

the woods take back the land.

9. Though he can’t know death, he must study dying

Knowing he must learn to die

or be beaten, he has looked

toward what he must come to,

that bad exchange

of all he knows for all

he doesn’t.

He has become the sufferer

of what he cannot help.

Knowing the euphemisms

of the salesmen leave the mind

wordless before its trials,

he has learned

among the quick plants

of his memory

to speak of their end.

When vision is marketed to win

there’s nothing in victory to desire.

And it’s not victory

that he’s going toward.

He leaves that for the others,

the younger, who will leave it.

It’s a vision that generous men

make themselves willing to give up

in order to have.

His luxury is the giving up of vanity:

“Why should a man eighty-one years old

care how he looks?”

10. The freedom of loving

After his long wakeful life,

he has come to love the world

as though it’s not to be lost.

Though he faces darkness, his hands

have no weight or harshness

on his small granddaughters’ heads.

His love doesn’t ask that they understand

it includes them. It includes, as freely,

the green plant leaves in the window,

clusters of white ripe peaches weighting

the branch among the weightless leaves.

There was an agony in ripening

that becomes irrelevant at last

to ripeness. His love

turned away from death, freely,

is equal to it.

11. He takes his time

There’s no need to hurry

to die. His days are received

and let go, as birds fly

through the broken windows

of an old house. All his traps

are baited, but not set.

On the porch, in the potato rows,

among the shades and neighbors

of his summer walks,

he finds time

for the perfecting of gifts.

12. The fern

His intimate the green fern

lives in his eye, its profusion

veiling the earthen pot,

the leaves lighted and shadowed

among the actions of the morning.

Between the fern and the old man

there has been conversation

all their lives. The leaves

have spoken to his eyes.

He has replied with his hands.

In his handing it has come down

Until now—a living

that has survived

all successions and sheddings.

Even when he was a boy

plants were his talent. His mother

would give him the weak ones

until he made them grow,

then buy them, healed, for dimes.

And from her he inherits

the fern, the life of it

on which the new leaves crest.

It feeds on the sun and the dirt

and does not hasten.

It has forgotten all deaths.

13. He is in the habit of the world

The world has finally worn him

until he is no longer strange to it.

His face has grown comfortable on him.

His hat is shaped to his way

of putting it on and taking it off,

the crown bordered

with the dark graph of his sweat.

He has become a scholar of plants

and gardens, the student

of his memory, attentive to pipesmoke

and the movements of shadows. His days

come to him as if they know him.

He has become one of the familiars

of the place, like a landmark

the birds no longer fear.

Among the greens of full summer,

among shadows like monuments,

he makes his way down,

loving the earth he will become.

14. The young man, thinking of the old

While we talk we hear across the town

two hammers galloping on a roof, and the high

curving squeal of an electric saw.

That is happening deep in the town’s being,

as weighted and clumsy with its hope

as a pregnant woman or a loaded barge.

And the old man sitting beside me knows

the tools and vision of a builder

of houses, and the uses of those.

His strong marriage has made

the accuracy of his dwelling.

As though always speaking openly

in a clear room, he has made

the ways of neighborhood

between his house and the town.

His life has been a monument to the place.

His garden rows go back through all

his summers, bearing their fading

script of vine and bloom,

what he has written on the ground,

its kind abundance, taken kindly from it.

Now, resting from his walk,

he’s comforted by the sounds

of hammering, half listened to.

He is comforted, not because he hopes

for much, but because he knows

of hope, its losses and uses.

He has gone in the world, visioning

a house worthy of the child

newborn in it.

THREE ELEGIAC POEMS

Harry Erdman Perry, 1881–1965

I

Let him escape hospital and doctor,

the manners and odors of strange places,

the dispassionate skills of experts.

Let him go free of tubes and needles,

public corridors, the surgical white

of life dwindled to poor pain.

Foreseeing the possibility of life without

possibility of joy, let him give it up.

Let him die in one of the old rooms

of his living, no stranger near him.

Let him go in peace out of the bodies

of his life—

flesh and marriage and household.

From the wide vision of his own windows

let him go out of sight; and the final

time and light of his life’s place be

last seen before his eyes’ slow

opening in the earth.

Let him go like one familiar with the way

into the wooded and tracked and

furrowed hill, his body.

II

I stand at the cistern in front of the old barn

in the darkness, in the dead of winter,

the night strangely warm, the wind blowing,

rattling an unlatched door.

I draw the cold water up out of the ground, and drink.

At the house the light is still waiting.

An old man I have loved all my life is dying

in his bed there. He is going

slowly down from himself.

In final obedience to his life, he follows

his body out of our knowing.

Only his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep

a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.

III

He goes free of the earth.

The sun of his last day sets

clear in the sweetness of his liberty.

The earth recovers from his dying,

the hallow of his life remaining

in all his death leaves.

Radiances know him. Grown lighter

than breath, he is set free

in our remembering. Grown brighter

than vision, he goes dark

into the life of the hill

that holds his peace.

He is hidden among all that is,

and cannot be lost.

OPENINGS

(1968)

THE THOUGHT OF SOMETHING ELSE

1.

A spring wind blowing

the smell of the ground

through the intersections of traffic,

the mind turns, seeks a new

nativity—another place,

simpler, less weighted

by what has already been.

Another place!

it’s enough to grieve me—

that old dream of going,

of becoming a better man

just by getting up and going

to a better place.

2.

The mystery. The old

unaccountable unfolding.

The iron trees in the park

suddenly remember forests.

It becomes possible to think of going.

3.

—a place where thought

can take its shape

as quietly in the mind

as water in a pitcher,

or a man can be

safely without thought

—see the day begin

and lean back,

a simple wakefulness filling

perfectly

the spaces among the leaves.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S SLAVES

Deep in the back ways of my mind I see them

going in the long days

over the same fields that I have gone

long days over.

I see the sun passing and burning high

over that land from their day

until mine, their shadows

having risen and consumed them.

I see them obeying and watching

the bearded tall man whose voice

and blood are mine, whose countenance

in stone at his grave my own resembles,

whose blindness is my brand.

I see them kneel and pray to the white God

who buys their souls with Heaven.

I see them approach, quiet

in the merchandise of their flesh,

to put down their burdens

of firewood and hemp and tobacco

into the minds of my kinsmen.

I see them moving in the rooms of my history,

the day of my birth entering

the horizon emptied of their days,

their purchased lives taken back

into the dust of birthright.

I see them borne, shadow within shadow,

shroud within shroud, through all nights

from their lives to mine, long beyond

reparation or given liberty

or any straightness.

I see them go in the bonds of my blood

through all the time of their bodies.

I have seen that freedom cannot be taken

from one man and given to another,

and cannot be taken and kept.

I know that freedom can only be given,

and is the gift to the giver

from the one who receives.

I am owned by the blood of all of them

who ever were owned by my blood.

We cannot be free of each other.

OCTOBER 10

Now constantly there is the sound,

quieter than rain,

of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright

gold, the sycamore limbs

bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers

are beeweed and aster, spray

of their white and lavender

over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds

loud—a landmark—now

that the life of summer falls

silent, and the nights grow.

THE SNAKE

At the end of October

I found on the floor of the woods

a small snake whose back

was patterned with the dark

of the dead leaves he lay on.

His body was thickened with a mouse

or small bird. He was cold,

so stuporous with his full belly

and the fall air that he hardly

troubled to flicker his tongue.

I held him a long time, thinking

of the perfection of the dark

marking on his back, the death

that swelled him, his living cold.

Now the cold of him stays

in my hand, and I think of him

lying below the frost,

big with a death to nourish him

during a long sleep.

THE COLD

How exactly good it is

to know myself

in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own

warmth, divided from all

by the cold; and to go

separate and sure

among the trees cleanly

divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,

your life withdrawn into

your own keeping

—to be clear, poised

in perfect self-suspension

toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the

goodness of that, it will be

good also to melt.

TO MY CHILDREN, FEARING FOR THEM

Terrors are to come. The earth

is poisoned with narrow lives.

I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats

at my heart. What have I done? I

need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see

what was done in blindness,

loving what I cannot save. Nor,

your eyes turning toward me,

can I wish your lives unmade

though the pain of them is on me.

THE WINTER RAIN

The leveling of the water, its increase,

the gathering of many into much:

in the cold dusk I stop

midway of the creek, listening

as it passes downward

loud over the rocks, under

the sound of the rain striking,

nowhere any sound

but the water, the dead

weedstems soaked with it, the

ground soaked, the earth overflowing.

And having waded all the way

across, I look back and see there

on the water the still sky.

MARCH SNOW

The morning lights

whiteness that has touched the world

perfectly as air.

In the whitened country

under the still fall of the snow

only the river, like a brown earth,

taking all falling darkly

into itself, moves.

APRIL WOODS: MORNING

Birth of color

out of night and the ground.

Luminous the gatherings

of bloodroot

newly risen, green leaf

white flower

in the sun, the dark

grown absent.

THE FINCHES

The ears stung with cold

sun and frost of dawn

in early April, comes

the song of winter finches,

their crimson bright, then

dark as they move into

and then against the light.

May the year warm them

soon. May they soon go

north with their singing

and the season follow.

May the bare sticks soon

live, and our minds go free

of the ground

into the shining of trees.

THE PORCH OVER THE RIVER

In the dusk of the river, the wind

gone, the trees grow still—

the beautiful poise of lightness,

the heavy world pushing toward it.

Beyond, on the face of the water,

lies the reflection of another tree,

inverted, pulsing with the short strokes

of waves the wind has stopped driving.

In a time when men no longer

can imagine the lives of their sons

this is still the world—

the world of my time, the grind

of engines marking the country

like an audible map, the high dark

marked by the flight of men,

lights stranger than stars.

The phoebes cross and re-cross

the openings, alert

for what may still be earned

from the light. The whippoorwills

begin, and the frogs. And the dark

falls, again, as it must.

The look of the world withdraws

into the vein of memory.

The mirrored tree, darkening, stirs

with the water’s inward life. What has

made it so?—a quietness in it

no question can be asked in.

BEFORE DARK

From the porch at dusk I watched

a kingfisher wild in flight

he could only have made for joy.

He came down the river, splashing

against the water’s dimming face

like a skipped rock, passing

on down out of sight. And still

I could hear the splashes

farther and farther away

as it grew darker. He came back

the same way, dusky as his shadow,

sudden beyond the willows.

The splashes went on out of hearing.

It was dark then. Somewhere

the night had accommodated him

—at the place he was headed for

or where, led by his delight,

he came.

THE DREAM

I dream an inescapable dream

in which I take away from the country

the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,

ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,

our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

I restore then the wide-branching trees.

I see growing over the land and shading it

the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.

I am aware of the rattling of their branches,

the lichened channels of their bark, the saps

of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.

Like the afterimage of a light that only by not

looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.

All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish

in dying as in being born. It is the life of its deaths.

I must end, always, by replacing

our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,

the flowing in of history, putting back what I took away,

trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge

to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.

My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness

growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.

I see that my mind is not good enough.

I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.

I find in my mouth a bitter taste of money,

a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.

I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all

that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.

Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?

THE SYCAMORE

for Harry Caudill

In the place that is my own place, whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in

that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

THE MEADOW

In the town’s graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself

of sorrow, the myrtle of the graves grown wild. The last

who knew the faces who had these names are dead,

and now the names fade, dumb on the stones, wild

as shadows in the grass, clear to the rabbit and the wren.

Ungrieved, the town’s ancestry fits the earth. They become

a meadow, their alien marble grown native as maple.

AGAINST THE WAR IN VIETNAM

Believe the automatic righteousness

of whoever holds an office. Believe

the officials who see without doubt

that peace is assured by war, freedom

by oppression. The truth preserved by lying

becomes a lie. Believe or die.

In the name of ourselves we ride

at the wheels of our engines,

in the name of Plenty devouring all,

the exhaust of our progress falling

deadly on villages and fields

we do not see. We are prepared

for millions of little deaths.

Where are the quiet plenteous dwellings

we were coming to, the neighborly holdings?

We see the American freedom defended

with lies, and the lies defended

with blood, the vision of Jefferson

served by the agony of children,

women cowering in holes.

DARK WITH POWER

Dark with power, we remain

the invaders of our land, leaving

deserts where forests were,

scars where there were hills.

On the mountains, on the rivers,

on the cities, on the farmlands

we lay weighted hands, our breath

potent with the death of all things.

Pray to us, farmers and villagers

of Vietnam. Pray to us, mothers

and children of helpless countries.

Ask for nothing.

We are carried in the belly

of what we have become

toward the shambles of our triumph,

far from the quiet houses.

Fed with dying, we gaze

on our might’s monuments of fire.

The world dangles from us

while we gaze.

IN MEMORY: STUART EGNAL

A high wooded hill near Florence, an April

afternoon. Below, the valley farms

were still and small, stall and field

hushed in brightness. Around us the woods

woke with sound, and shadows lived

in the air and on the dry leaves. You

were drawing what we saw. Its forms

and lights reached slowly to your page.

We talked, and laughed at what we said.

Fine hours. The sort men dream

of having, and of having had. Today

while I slept I saw it all

again, and words for you came to me

as though we sat there talking still

in the quick of April. A wakening

strangeness—here in another valley

you never lived to come to—half

a dialogue, keeping on.

THE WANT OF PEACE

All goes back to the earth,

and so I do not desire

pride of excess or power,

but the contentments made

by men who have had little:

the fisherman’s silence

receiving the river’s grace,

the gardner’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.

I am never wholly in place.

I find no peace or grace.

We sell the world to buy fire,

our way lighted by burning men,

and that has bent my mind

and made me think of darkness

and wish for the dumb life of roots.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

GRACE

for Gurney Norman, quoting him

The woods is shining this morning.

Red, gold and green, the leaves

lie on the ground, or fall,

or hang full of light in the air still.

Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes

the place it has been coming to forever.

It has not hastened here, or lagged.

See how surely it has sought itself,

its roots passing lordly through the earth.

See how without confusion it is

all that it is, and how flawless

its grace is. Running or walking, the way

is the same. Be still. Be still.

“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”

TO THINK OF THE LIFE OF A MAN

In a time that breaks

in cutting pieces all around,

when men, voiceless

against thing-ridden men,

set themselves on fire, it seems

too difficult and rare

to think of the life of a man

grown whole in the world,

at peace and in place.

But having thought of it

I am beyond the time

I might have sold my hands

or sold my voice and mind

to the arguments of power

that go blind against

what they would destroy.

MARRIAGE

to Tanya

How hard it is for me, who live

in the excitement of women

and have the desire for them

in my mouth like salt. Yet

you have taken me and quieted me.

You have been such light to me

that other women have been

your shadows. You come near me

with the nearness of sleep.

And yet I am not quiet.

It is to be broken. It is to be

torn open. It is not to be

reached and come to rest in

ever. I turn against you,

I break from you, I turn to you.

We hurt, and are hurt,

and have each other for healing.

It is healing. It is never whole.

DO NOT BE ASHAMED

You will be walking some night

in the comfortable dark of your yard

and suddenly a great light will shine

round about you, and behind you

will be a wall you never saw before.

It will be clear to you suddenly

that you were about to escape,

and that you are guilty: you misread

the complex instructions, you are not

a member, you lost your card

or never had one. And you will know

that they have been there all along,

their eyes on your letters and books,

their hands in your pockets,

their ears wired to your bed.

Though you have done nothing shameful,

they will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you say you are ashamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

then such light as you have made

in your history will leave you.

They will no longer need to pursue you.

You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.

They will not forgive you.

There is no power against them.

It is only candor that is aloof from them,

only an inward clarity, unashamed,

that they cannot reach. Be ready.

When their light has picked you out

and their questions are asked, say to them:

“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon

will come around you. The heron will begin

his evening flight from the hilltop.

WINDOW POEMS

1.

Window. Window.

The wind’s eye

to see into the wind.

The eye in its hollow

looking out

through the black frame

at the waves the wind

drives up the river,

whitecaps, a wild day,

the white sky

traveled by snow squalls,

the trees thrashing,

the corn blades driven,

quivering, straight out.

2.

The foliage has dropped

below the window’s grave edge,

baring the sky, the distant

hills, the branches,

the year’s greenness

gone down from the high

light where it so fairly

defied falling.

The country opens to the sky,

the eye purified among hard facts:

the black grid of the window,

the wood of trees branching

outward and outward

to the nervousness of twigs,

buds asleep in the air.

3.

The window has forty

panes, forty clarities

variously wrinkled, streaked

with dried rain, smudged,

dusted. The frame

is a black grid

beyond which the world

flings up the wild

graph of its growth,

tree branch, river,

slope of land,

the river passing

downward, the clouds blowing,

usually, from the west,

the opposite way.

The window is a form

of consciousness, pattern

of formed sense

through which to look

into the wild

that is a pattern too,

but dark and flowing,

bearing along the little

shapes of the mind

as the river bears

a sash of some blinded house.

This windy day

on one of the panes

a blown seed, caught

in cobweb, beats and beats.

4.

This is the wind’s eye,

Wendell’s window

dedicated to purposes

dark to him, a seeing into

days to come, the winds

of the days as they approach

and go by. He has come

mornings of four years

to be thoughtful here

while day and night

cold and heat

beat upon the world.

In the low room

within the weathers,

sitting at the window,

he has shed himself

at times, and been renewed.

The spark at his wrist

flickers and dies, flickers

and dies. The life in him

grows and subsides

and grows again

like the icicle throbbing

winter after winter

at a wrinkle in the eave,

flowing over itself

as it comes and goes,

fluid as a branch.

5.

Look in

and see him looking out.

He is not always

quiet, but there have been times

when happiness has come

to him, unasked,

like the stillness on the water

that holds the evening clear

while it subsides

—and he let go

what he was not.

His ancestor is the hill

that rises in the winter wind

beyond the blind wall

at his back.

It wears a patched robe

of some history that he knows

and some that he

does not: healed fields

where the woods come back

after a time of crops,

human history

done with, a few

ragged fences surviving

among the trees;

and on the ridges still

there are open fields

where the cattle look up

to watch him on his walks

with eyes patient as time.

The hill has known

too many days and men

grown quiet behind him.

But there are mornings

when his soul emerges

from darkness

as out of a hollow in a tree

high on the crest

and takes flight

with savage joy and harsh

outcry down the long slope

of the leaves. And nights

when he sleeps sweating

under the burden of the hill.

At the window

he sits and looks out,

musing on the river,

a little brown hen duck

paddling upstream

among the windwaves

close to the far bank.

What he has understood

lies behind him

like a road in the woods. He is

a wilderness looking out

at the wild.

6.

A warm day in December,

and the rain falling

steadily through the morning

as the man works

at his table, the window

staring into the valley

as though conscious

when he is not. The cold river

steams in the warm air.

It is rising. Already

the lowest willows

stand in the water

and the swift currents

fold round them.

The bare twigs of the elms

are beaded with bright drops

that grow slowly heavy

and fall, bigger

and slower than the rain.

A fox squirrel comes

through the trees, hurrying

someplace, but it seems

to be raining everywhere,

and he submits to wetness

and sits still, miserable

maybe, for an hour.

How sheltering and clear

the window seems, the dry fireheat

inside, and outside the gray

downpour. As the man works

the weather moves

upon his mind, its dreariness

a kind of comfort.

7.

Outside the window

is a roofed wooden tray

he fills with seeds for the birds.

They make a sort of dance

as they descend and light

and fly off at a slant

across the strictly divided

black sash. At first

they came fearfully, worried

by the man’s movements

inside the room. They watched

his eyes, and flew

when he looked. Now they expect

no harm from him

and forget he’s there.

They come into his vision,

unafraid. He keeps

a certain distance and quietness

in tribute to them.

That they ignore him

he takes in tribute to himself.

But they stay cautious

of each other, half afraid, unwilling

to be too close. They snatch

what they can carry and fly

into the trees. They flirt out

with tail or beak and waste

more sometimes then they eat.

And the man, knowing

the price of seed, wishes

they would take more care.

But they understand only

what is free, and he

can give only as they

will take. Thus they have

enlightened him. He buys

the seed, to make it free.

8.

The river is rising,

approaching the window

in awful nearness.

Over it the air holds

a tense premonition

of the water’s dark body

living where yesterday

things breathed. As he works

through the morning

the man has trouble

in the corner of his eye,

whole trees turning

in the channel as they go by,

the currents loaded

with the trash of the woods

and the trash of towns,

bearing down, and rising.

9.

There is a sort of vertical

geography that portions his life.

Outside, the chickadees

and titmice scrounge

his sunflower seed. The cardinals

feed like fires on mats of drift

lying on the currents

of the swollen river.

The air is a bridge

and they are free. He imagines

a necessary joy

in things that must fly

to eat. He is set apart

by the black grid of the window

and, below it, the table

of the contents of his mind:

notes and remnants,

uncompleted work,

unanswered mail,

unread books

—the subjects of conscience,

his yoke-fellow,

whose whispered accounting

has stopped one ear, leaving him

half deaf to the world.

Some pads of paper,

eleven pencils,

a leaky pen,

a jar of ink

are his powers. He’ll

never fly.

10.

Rising, the river

is wild. There is no end

to what one may imagine

whose lands and buildings

lie in its reach. To one

who has felt his little boat

taken this way and that

in the braided currents

it is beyond speech.

“What’s the river doing?”

“Coming up.”

In Port Royal, that begins

a submergence of minds.

Heads are darkened.

To the man at work

through the mornings

in the long-legged cabin

above the water, there is

an influence of the rise

that he feels in his footsoles

and in his belly

even when he thinks

of something else. The window

looks out, like a word,

upon the wordless, fact

dissolving into mystery, darkness

overtaking light.

And the water reaches a height

it can only fall from, leaving

the tree trunks wet.

It has made a roof

to its rising, and become

a domestic thing.

It lies down in its place

like a horse in his stall.

Facts emerge from it:

drift it has hung in the trees,

stranded cans and bottles,

new carving in the banks

—a place of change, changed.

It leaves a mystic plane

in the air, a membrane

of history stretched between

the silt-lines on the banks,

a depth that for months

the man will go from his window

down into, knowing

he goes within the reach

of a dark power: where

the birds are, fish

were.

11.

How fine

to have a long-legged house

with a many-glassed window

looking out on the river

—and the wren singing

on a winter morning! How fine

to sweep the floor,

opening the doors

to let the air change,

and then to sit down

in the freshened room,

day pouring in the window!

But this is only for a while.

This house was not always

here. Another stood

in its place, and weathered

and grew old. He tore it down

and used the good of it

to build this. And farther on

another stood

that is gone. Nobody

alive now knows

how it looked, though some

recall a springhouse

that is gone too now. The stones

strew the pasture grass

where a roan colt grazes

and lifts his head to snort

at commotions in the wind.

All passes, and the man

at work in the house

has mostly ceased to mind.

There will be pangs

of ending, and he regrets

the terrors men bring to men.

But all passes—there is even

a kind of solace in that.

He has imagined animals

grazing at nightfall

on the place where his house stands.

Already his spirit

is with them, with a strange attentiveness,

hearing the grass

quietly tearing as they graze.

12.

The country where he lives

is haunted

by the ghost of an old forest.

In the cleared fields

where he gardens

and pastures his horses

it stood once,

and will return. There will be

a resurrection of the wild.

Already it stands in wait

at the pasture fences.

It is rising up

in the waste places of the cities.

When the fools of the capitals

have devoured each other

in righteousness,

and the machines have eaten

the rest of us, then

there will be the second coming

of the trees. They will come

straggling over the fences

slowly, but soon enough.

The highways will sound

with the feet of the wild herds,

returning. Beaver will ascend

the streams as the trees

close over them.

The wolf and the panther

will find their old ways

through the nights. Water

and air will flow clear.

Certain calamities

will have passed,

and certain pleasures.

The wind will do without

corners. How difficult

to think of it: miles and miles

and no window.

13.

Sometimes he thinks the earth

might be better without humans.

He’s ashamed of that.

It worries him,

him being a human, and needing

to think well of the others

in order to think well of himself.

And there are

a few he thinks well of,

a few he loves

as well as himself almost,

and he would like to say

better. But history

is so largely unforgivable.

And now his mighty government

wants to help everybody

even if it has to kill them

to do it—like the fellow in the story

who helped his neighbor to Heaven:

“I heard the Lord calling him,

Judge, and I sent him on.”

According to the government

everybody is just waiting

to be given a chance

to be like us. He can’t

go along with that.

Here is a thing, flesh of his flesh,

that he hates. He would like

a little assurance

that no one will destroy the world

for some good cause.

Until he dies, he would like his life

to pertain to the earth.

But there is something in him

that will wait, even

while he protests,

for things turn out as they will.

Out his window this morning

he saw nine ducks in flight,

and a hawk dive at his mate

in delight.

The day stands apart

from the calendar. There is a will

that receives it as enough.

He is given a fragment of time

in this fragment of the world.

He likes it pretty well.

14.

The longest night is past.

It is the blessed morning of the year.

Beyond the window, snow

in patches on the river bank,

frosty sunlight on the dry corn,

and buds on the water maples

red, red in the cold.

15.

The sycamore gathers

out of the sky, white

in the glance that looks up to it

through the black crisscross

of the window. But it is not a glance

that it offers itself to.

It is no lightning stroke

caught in the eye. It stays,

an old holding in place.

And its white is not so pure

as a glance would have it,

but emerges partially,

the tree’s renewal of itself,

among the mottled browns

and olives of the old bark.

Its dazzling comes into the sun

a little at a time

as though a god in it

is slowly revealing himself.

How often the man of the window

has studied its motley trunk,

the out-starting of its branches,

its smooth crotches,

its revelations of whiteness,

hoping to see beyond his glances,

the distorting geometry

of preconception and habit,

to know it beyond words.

All he has learned of it

does not add up to it.

There is a bird who nests in it

in the summer and seems to sing of it—

the quick lights among its leaves

—better than he can.

It is not by his imagining

its whiteness comes.

The world is greater than its words.

To speak of it the mind must bend.

16.

His mind gone from the window

into dark thought, suddenly

a flash of water

lights in the corner of his eye:

the kingfisher is rising,

laden, out of his plunge,

the water still subsiding

under the bare willow.

The window becomes a part

of his mind’s history, the entrance

of days into it. And awake

now, watching the water flow

beyond the glass, his mind

is watched by a spectre of itself

that is a window on the past.

Life steadily adding

its subtractions, it has fallen

to him to remember

and old man who, dying,

dreamed of his garden,

a harvest so bountiful

he couldn’t carry it home

—another who saw

in the flaws of the moon

a woman’s face

like a cameo.

17.

For a night and a day

his friend stayed here

on his way across the continent.

In the afternoon they walked

down from Port Royal

to the river, following

for a while the fall of Camp Branch

through the woods,

then crossing the ridge

and entering the woods again

on the valley rim. They talked

of history—men who saw visions

of crops where the woods stood

and stand again, the crops

gone. They ate the cold apples

they carried in their pockets.

They lay on a log in the sun

to rest, looking up

through bare branches at the sky.

They saw a nuthatch walk

in a loop on the side of a tree

in a late patch of light

while below them the Lexington

shoved sand up the river,

her diesels shaking the air.

They walked along trees

across ravines. Now his friend

is back on the highway, and he sits again

at his window. Another day.

During the night snow fell.

18.

The window grows fragile

in a time of war.

The man seated beneath it

feels its glass turn deadly.

He feels the nakedness

of his face and throat.

Its shards and splinters balance

in transparence, delicately

seamed. In the violence

of men against men, it will not last.

In any mind turned away

in hate, it will go blind,

Men spare one another

by will. When there is hate

it is joyous to kill. And he

has borne the hunger to destroy,

riding anger like a captain,

savage, exalted and blind.

There is war in his veins

like a loud song.

He has known his heart to rise

in glad holocaust against his kind,

and felt hard in thigh and arm

the thew of fury.

19.

Peace. May he waken

not too late from his wraths

to find his window still

clear in its wall, and the world

there. Within things

there is peace, and at the end

of things. It is the mind

turned away from the world

that turns against it.

The armed presidents stand

on deadly islands in the air,

overshadowing the crops.

Peace. Let men, who cannot be brothers

to themselves, be brothers

to mulleins and daisies

that have learned to live on the earth.

Let them understand the pride

of sycamores and thrushes

that receive the light gladly, and do not

think to illuminate themselves.

Let them know that the foxes and the owls

are joyous in their lives,

and their gayety is praise to the heavens,

and they do not raven with their minds.

In the night the devourer,

and in the morning all things

find the light a comfort.

Peace. The earth turns

against all living, in the end.

And when mind has not outraged

itself against its nature,

they die and become the place

they lived in. Peace to the bones

that walk in the sun toward death,

for they will come to it soon enough.

Let the phoebes return in spring

and build their nest of moss

in the porch rafters,

and in autumn let them depart.

Let the garden be planted,

and let the frost come.

Peace to the porch and the garden.

Peace to the man in the window.

20.

In the early morning dark

he dreamed of the spring woodsflowers

standing in the ground,

dark yet under the leaves and under

the bare cold branches.

But in his dream he knew their way

was prepared, and in their time

they would rise up joyful.

And though he had dreamed earlier

of strife, his sleep became peaceful.

He said: If we, who have killed

our brothers and hated ourselves,

are made in the image of God,

then surely the bloodroot,

wild phlox, trillium and mayapple

are more truly made

in God’s image, for they have desired

to be no more than they are,

and they have spared each other.

Their future

is undiminished by their past.

Let me, he said in his dream,

become always less a soldier

and more a man,

for what is unopened in the ground

is pledged to peace.

When he woke and went out

a flock of wild ducks that had fed

on the river while he slept

flew off in fear of him.

And he walked, manly, into the new day.

He came to his window

where he sat and looked out,

the earth before him, blessed

by his dream of peace,

bad history behind him.

21.

He has known a tunnel

through the falling snow

that brought him back at dark

and nearly killed him on the way,

the road white as the sky

and the snow piling.

Mortality crept up close

in the darkness round his eyes.

He felt his death’s wrenched avatars

lying like silent animals

along the ditch. He thought

of his wife, his supper and his bed,

and kept on, and made it.

Now he sits at the window

again, the country hard and bright

in this winter’s coldest morning.

The river, unfrozen still,

gives off a breath of smoke

that flows upstream with the wind.

Behind him that burrow

along the wild road

grows certain in his mind,

leading here, surely. It has arrived

at the window, and is clarified.

Now he has learned another way

he can come here. Luck

taught him, and desire.

The snow lies under the woods

and February is ending.

Far off, another way, he hears

the flute of spring,

an old-style traveler,

wandering through the trees.

22.

Still sleeping, he heard

the phoebe call, and woke to it,

and winter passed out of his mind.

The bird, in the high branches

above the road-culvert mouth,

sang to what was sleeping,

two notes, clear and

harsh. The stream came,

full-voiced, down the rocks

out of the woods. The wood ducks

have come back to nest

in the old hollow sycamore.

The window has changed, no longer

remembering, but waiting.

23.

He stood on the ground

and saw his wife borne away

in the air, and suddenly

knew her. It is not the sky

he trusts her to, or her flight,

but to herself as he saw her

turn back and smile. And he

turned back to the buried garden

where the spring flood rose.

The window is made strange

by these days he has come to.

She is the comfort of the rooms

she leaves behind her.

24.

His love returns

and walks among the trees,

a new time lying beneath

the leaves at her feet.

There are songs in the ground

audible to her. She enters

the dark globe of sleep,

waking the tree frogs

whose songs star the silence

in constellations. She wakens

the birds of mornings. The sun

makes a low gentle piping.

The bloodroot rises in its folded

leaf, and there is a tensing

in the woods. There is

no window where she is.

All is clear where the light begins

to dress the branch in green.

25.

The bloodroot is white

in the woods, and men renew

their abuse of the world

and each other. Abroad

we burn and maim

in the name of principles

we no longer recognize in acts.

At home our flayed land

flows endlessly

to burial in the sea.

When mortality is not heavy

on us, humanity is—

public meaninglessness

preying on private meaning.

As the weather warms, the driven

swarm into the river,

pursued by whining engines,

missing the world

as they pass over it,

every man

his own mosquito.

26.

In the heron’s eye

is one of the dies of change.

Another

is in the sun.

Each thing is carried

beyond itself.

The man of the window

lives at the edge,

knowing the approach

of what must be, joy

and dread.

Now the old sycamore

yields at its crown

a dead branch.

It will sink like evening

into its standing place.

The young trees rise,

and the dew is on them,

and the heat of the day

is on them, and the dark

—end and beginning

without end.

27.

Now that April with sweet rain

has come to Port William again,

Burley Coulter rows out

on the river to fish.

He sits all day in his boat,

tied to a willow, his hat

among green branches,

his dark line curving

in the wind. He is one

with the sun.

The current’s horses graze

in the shade along the banks.

The watcher leaves his window

and goes out.

He sits in the woods, watched

by more than he sees.

What is his is

past. He has come

to a rootless place

and a windowless.

There is a wild light

his mind loses

until the spring renews,

but it holds his mind

and will not let it rest.

The window is a fragment

of the world suspended

in the world, the known

adrift in mystery.

And now the green

rises. The window has an edge

that is celestial,

where the eyes are surpassed.

TO A SIBERIAN WOODSMAN

(after looking at some pictures in a magazine)

1.

You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper,

listening to your daughter play the accordion. You smile

with the pleasure of a man confident in his hands, resting

after a day of long labor in the forest, the cry of the saw

in your head, and the vision of coming home to rest.

Your daughter’s face is clear in the joy of hearing

her own music. Her fingers live on the keys

like people familiar with the land they were born in.

You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son,

tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams.

Over you, as your hands work, is the dream of the still pools.

Over you is the dream

of your silence while the east brightens, birds waking close by

you in the trees.

2.

I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn,

your son in your tracks.

You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest

whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound

of your own voice

or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to

speak,

and soon the voice of the stream rises ahead of you, and you

take the path beside it.

I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over

you

as you come to the pool where you will fish, and of the mist

drifting

over the water, and of the cast fly resting light on the face of the

pool.

3.

And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself

in the world. I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy

and slow along the feet of the trees. I hear the voices of the wren

and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the

windows

and over the roof. In my house my daughter learns the

womanhood

of her mother. My son is at play, pretending to be

the man he believes I am. I am the outbreathing of this ground.

My words are its words as the wren’s song is its song.

4.

Who has invented our enmity? Who has prescribed us

hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other

with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger

that I should desire the burning of your house or the

destruction of your children?

Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the

thought

that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and

rivers, and the silence of birds?

Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange

to you, and the voices of your land strange to me?

Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to

destroy you,

or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has

imagined

that your death could be negligible to me now that I have seen

these pictures of your face?

Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,

or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with

you in the forest?

And now one of the ideas of my place will be that you would

gladly talk and visit and work with me.

5.

I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in.

As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as

carefully as they hold to it.

I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the

sycamore,

or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the

walnut,

nor has the elm bowed before the monuments or sworn the oath

of allegiance.

They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.

6.

In the thought of you I imagine myself free of the weapons and

the official hates that I have borne on my back like a

hump,

and in the thought of myself I imagine you free of weapons and

official hates,

so that if we should meet we would not go by each other

looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their

burdens,

but would stand clear in the gaze of each other.

7.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with

you in silence beside the forest pool.

There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose

hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who

dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.

There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he

comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.

A DISCIPLINE

Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches

on every side, there is no other place

to turn. Dawning in your veins

is the light of the blast

that will print your shadow on stone

in a last antic of despair

to survive you in the dark.

Man has put his history to sleep

in the engine of doom. It flies

over his dreams in the night,

a blazing cocoon. O gaze into the fire

and be consumed with man’s despair,

and be still, and wait. And then see

the world go on with the patient work

of seasons, embroidering birdsong

upon itself as for a wedding, and feel

your heart set out in the morning

like a young traveler, arguing the world

from the kiss of a pretty girl.

It is the time’s discipline to think

of the death of all living, and yet live.

A POEM OF THANKS

I have been spared another day

to come into this night

as though there is a mercy in things

mindful of me. Love, cast all

thought aside. I cast aside

all thought. Our bodies enter

their brief precedence,

surrounded by their sleep.

Through you I rise, and you

through me, into the joy

we make, but may not keep.

ENVOY

Love, all day there has been at the edge of my mind

the wish that my life would hurry on,

my days pass quickly and be done,

for I felt myself a man carrying a loose tottering bundle

along a narrow scaffold: if I could carry it

fast enough, I could hold it together to the end.

Now, leaving my perplexity and haste,

I come within the boundaries of your life, an interior

clear and calm. You could not admit me burdened.

I approach you clean as a child of all that has been with me.

You speak to me in the dark tongue of my joy

that you do not know. In you I know

the deep leisure of the filling moon. May I live long.

FARMING: A HAND BOOK

(1970)

For Owen and Loyce Flood

THE MAN BORN TO FARMING

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,

to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

descending in the dark?

THE STONES

I owned a slope full of stones.

Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,

shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks

where the earth caught and kept them

dark, an old music mute in them

that my head keeps now I have dug them out.

I broke them where they slugged in their dark

cells, and lifted them up in pieces.

As I piled them in the light

I began their music. I heard their old lime

rouse in breath of song that has not left me.

I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.

What bond have I made with the earth,

having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing

I have carried with me out of that day.

The stones have given me music

that figures for me their holes in the earth

and their long lying in them dark.

They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,

and I must prepare a fitting silence.

THE SUPPLANTING

Where the road came, no longer bearing men,

but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,

the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils

rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic

and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle

with white bloom. For a while in the years of its wilderness

a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there

in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire

to the remnants of house and shed, and let time

hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all

would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste

like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed

then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me

something that would not bear my name—something that

bears us

through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

SOWING

In the stilled place that once was a road going down

from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

history’s death upon the place and the trees that would

have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

THE FAMILIAR

The hand is risen from the earth,

the sap risen, leaf come back to branch,

bird to nest crotch. Beans lift

their heads up in the row. The known

returns to be known again. Going

and coming back, it forms its curves,

a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.

THE FARMER AMONG THE TOMBS

I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,

their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,

the bones imprisoned under them.

Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!

Pry open the vaults and the coffins

so the dead may nourish their graves

and go free, their acres traversed all summer

by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.

FOR THE REBUILDING OF A HOUSE

To know the inhabiting reasons

of trees and streams, old men

who shed their lives

on the world like leaves,

I watch them go.

And I go. I build

the place of my leaving.

The days arc into vision

like fish leaping, their shining

caught in the stream.

I watch them go

in homage and sorrow.

I build the place of my dream.

I build the place of my leaving

that the dark may come clean.

THE SPRINGS

In a country without saints or shrines

I know one who made his pilgrimage

to springs, where in his life’s dry years

his mind held on. Everlasting,

people called them, and gave them names.

The water broke into sounds and shinings

at the vein mouth, bearing the taste

of the place, the deep rock, sweetness

out of the dark. He bent and drank

in bondage to the ground.

RAIN

It is a day of the earth’s renewing without any man’s doing or

help.

Though I have fields I do not go out to work in them.

Though I have crops standing in rows I do not go out

to look at them or gather what has ripened or hoe the weeds

from the balks.

Though I have animals I stay dry in the house while they graze

in the wet.

Though I have buildings they stand closed under their roofs.

Though I have fences they go without me.

My life stands in place, covered, like a hayrick or a mushroom.

SLEEP

I love to lie down weary

under the stalk of sleep

growing slowly out of my head,

the dark leaves meshing.

TO KNOW THE DARK

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

WINTER NIGHT POEM FOR MARY

As I started home after dark

I looked into the sky and saw the new moon,

an old man with a basket on his arm.

He walked among the cedars in the bare woods.

They stood like guardians, dark

as he passed. He might have been singing,

or he might not. He might have been sowing

the spring flowers, or he might not. But I saw him

with his basket, going along the hilltop.

WINTER NIGHTFALL

The fowls speak and sing, settling for the night.

The mare shifts in the bedding.

In her womb her foal sleeps and grows,

within and within and within. Her jaw grinds,

meditative in the fragrance of timothy.

Soon now my own rest will come.

The silent river flows on in the dusk, miles and miles.

Outside the walls and on the roof and in the woods

the cold rain falls.

FEBRUARY 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

MARCH 22, 1968

As spring begins the river rises,

filling like the sorrow of nations

—uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains,

the debris of kitchens, all passing

seaward. At dawn snow began to fall.

The ducks, moving north, pass

like shadows through the falling white.

The jonquils, half open, bend down with its weight.

The plow freezes in the furrow.

In the night I lay awake, thinking

of the river rising, the spring heavy

with official meaningless deaths.

THE MORNING’S NEWS

To moralize the state, they drag out a man,

and bind his hands, and darken his eyes

with a black rag to be free of the light in them,

and tie him to a post, and kill him.

And I am sickened by complicity in my race.

To kill in hot savagery like a beast

is understandable. It is forgivable and curable.

But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath,

that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.

The serpent in gentle, compared to man.

It is man, the inventor of cold violence,

death as waste, who has made himself lonely

among the creatures, and set himself aside,

so that he cannot work in the sun with hope,

or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.

The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head

at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes

open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake

in the agony of the old giving birth to the new

without assurance that the new will be better.

I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,

they are so open to the world.

I look at my sloping fields now turning

green with the young grass of April. What must I do

to go free? I think I must put on

a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die

rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.

I will purge my mind of the airy claims

of church and state. I will serve the earth

and not pretend my life could better serve.

Another morning comes with its strange cure.

The earth is news. Though the river floods

and the spring is cold, my heart goes on,

faithful to a mystery in a cloud,

and the summer’s garden continues its descent

through me, toward the ground.

ENRICHING THE EARTH

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and of various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling

into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth. And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

A WET TIME

The land is an ark, full of things waiting.

Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks

filling with water as the foot is raised.

The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands

become obscure in their use, prehistoric.

The mind passes over changed surfaces

like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs

and to the thought of swimming and wading birds.

Along the river croplands and gardens

are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark

and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch

holding the new nest of the hummingbird

the river flows heavy with earth, the water

turned the color of broken slopes. I stand

deep in the mud of the shore, a stake

planted to measure the rise, the water rising,

the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood

passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots

drag the bottom. I was not ready for this

parting, my native land putting out to sea.

THE SILENCE

What must a man do to be at home in the world?

There must be times when he is here

as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven shadows

of the grass and the flighty darknesses

of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond

the sense of the weariness of engines and of his own heart,

his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him

as though his bones fade beyond thought

into the shadows that grow out of the ground

so that the furrow he opens in the earth opens

in his bones, and he hears the silence

of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here

a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up

before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind

rain! What songs he will hear!

IN THIS WORLD

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,

tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses

are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill

dark floodwater moves down the river.

The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.

I have climbed up to water the horses

and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,

letting the day gather and pass. Below me

cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,

slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world

men are making plans, wearing themselves out,

spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

THE NEW ROOF

On the housetop, the floor of the boundless

where birds and storms fly and disappear,

and the valley opened over our heads, a leap

of clarity between the hills, we bent five days

in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on

the new, letting the sun touch for once

in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then

securing the house again in its shelter and shade.

Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history

has come between me and the sky.

A PRAISE

His memories lived in the place

like fingers locked in the rock ledges

like roots. When he died

and his influence entered the air

I said, Let my mind be the earth

of his thought, let his kindness

go ahead of me. Though I do not escape

the history barbed in my flesh,

certain wise movements of his hands,

the turns of his speech

keep with me. His hope of peace

keeps with me in harsh days,

the shell of his breath dimming away

three summers in the earth.

ON THE HILL LATE AT NIGHT

The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight

in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness

of the grass, fathomless, the long blades

rising out of the well of time. Cars

travel the valley roads below me, their lights

finding the dark, and racing on. Above

their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard,

and felt the country turn under the stars

toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here

between the bright silent thousands of stars

and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.

The hill has grown to me like a foot.

Until I lift the earth I cannot move.

THE SEEDS

The seeds begin abstract as their species,

remote as the name on the sack

they are carried home in: Fayette Seed Company

Corner of Vine and Rose. But the sower

going forth to sow sets foot

into time to come, the seeds falling

on his own place. He has prepared a way

for his life to come to him, if it will.

Like a tree, he has given roots

to the earth, and stands free.

THE WISH TO BE GENEROUS

All that I serve will die, all my delights,

the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,

the silent lilies standing in the woods,

the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all

will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle

in its own age. Let the world bring on me

the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know

my little light taken from me into the seed

of the beginning and the end, so I may bow

to mystery, and take my stand on the earth

like a tree in a field, passing without haste

or regret toward what will be, my life

a patient willing descent into the grass.

AIR AND FIRE

From my wife and household and fields

that I have so carefully come to in my time

I enter the craziness of travel,

the reckless elements of air and fire.

Having risen up from my native land,

I find myself smiled at by beautiful women,

making me long for a whole life

to devote to each one, making love to her

in some house, in some way of sleeping

and waking I would make only for her.

And all over the country I find myself

falling in love with houses, woods, and farms

that I will never set foot in.

My eyes go wandering through America,

two wayfaring brothers, resting in silence

against the forbidden gates. O what if

an angel came to me, and said,

“Go free of what you have done. Take

what you want.” The atoms of blood

and brain and bone strain apart

at the thought. What I am is the way home.

Like rest after a sleepless night,

my old love comes on me in midair.

THE LILIES

Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found

the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,

frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air

held or moved them as it stood or moved.

The ground that slept beneath us woke in them

and made a music of the light, as it had waked

and sung in fragile things unnumbered years,

and left their kind no less symmetrical and fair

for all that time. Does my land have the health

of this, where nothing falls but into life?

INDEPENDENCE DAY

for Gene Meatyard

Between painting a roof yesterday and the hay

harvest tomorrow, a holiday in the woods

under the grooved trunks and branches, the roof

of leaves lighted and shadowed by the sky.

As America from England, the woods stands free

from politics and anthems. So in the woods I stand

free, knowing my land. My country, ‘tis of the

drying pools along Camp Branch I sing

where the water striders walk like Christ,

all sons of God, and of the woods grown old

on the stony hill where the thrush’s song rises

in the light like a curling vine and the bobwhite’s

whistle opens in the air, broad and pointed as a leaf.

A STANDING GROUND

Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;

Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal . . .

However just and anxious I have been,

I will stop and step back

from the crowd of those who may agree

with what I say, and be apart.

There is no earthly promise of life or peace

but where the roots branch and weave

their patient silent passages in the dark;

uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.

I am not bound for any public place,

but for ground of my own

where I have planted vines and orchard trees,

and in the heat of the day climbed up

into the healing shadow of the woods.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn

and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

SONG IN A YEAR OF CATASTROPHE

I began to be followed by a voice saying:

“It can’t last. It can’t last.

Harden yourself. Harden yourself.

Be ready. Be ready.”

“Go look under the leaves,”

it said, “for what is living there

is long dead in your tongue.”

And it said, “Put your hands

into the earth. Live close

to the ground. Learn the darkness.

Gather round you all

the things that you love, name

their names, prepare

to lose them. It will be

as if all you know were turned

around within your body.”

And I went and put my hands

into the ground, and they took root

and grew into a season’s harvest.

I looked behind the veil

of the leaves, and heard voices

that I knew had been dead

in my tongue years before my birth.

I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me.

Waking in the early mornings,

I could hear it, like a bird

bemused among the leaves,

a mockingbird idly singing

in the autumn of catastrophe:

“Be ready. Be ready.

Harden yourself. Harden yourself.”

And I heard the sound

of a great engine pounding

in the air, and a voice asking:

“Change or slavery?

Hardship or slavery?”

and voices answering:

“Slavery! Slavery!”

And I was afraid, loving

what I knew would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:

“You have not yet come close enough.

Come nearer the ground. Learn

from the woodcock in the woods

whose feathering is a ritual

of the fallen leaves,

and from the nesting quail

whose speckling makes her hard to see

in the long grass.

Study the coat of the mole.

For the farmer shall wear

the furrows and the greenery

of his fields, and bear

the long standing of the woods.”

And I asked: “You mean death, then?”

“Yes,” the voice said. “Die

into what the earth requires of you.”

I let go all holds then, and sank

like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,

and at last came fully into the ease

and the joy of that place,

all my lost ones returning.

9/28/68

THE CURRENT

Having once put his hand into the ground,

seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,

a man has made a marriage with his place,

and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.

His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.

It has reached into the dark like a root

and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness,

a flickering sap coursing upward into his head

so that he sees the old tribespeople bend

in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening

to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,

their lodges and graves, and closing again.

He is made their descendant, what they left

in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.

And he sees the bearers of his own blood arriving,

the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,

their hands gathering the stones up into walls,

and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground

to lie still under the black wheels of machines.

The current flowing to him through the earth

flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,

a young man who has reached into the ground,

his hand held in the dark as by a hand.

THE MAD FARMER REVOLUTION

being a fragment

of the natural history of New Eden,

in homage

to Mr. Ed McClanahan, one of the locals

The mad farmer, the thirsty one,

went dry. When he had time

he threw a visionary high

lonesome on the holy communion wine.

“It is an awesome event

when an earthen man has drunk

his fill of the blood of a god,”

people said, and got out of his way.

He plowed the churchyard, the

minister’s wife, three graveyards

and a golf course. In a parking lot

he planted a forest of little pines.

He sanctified the groves,

dancing at night in the oak shades

with goddesses. He led

a field of corn to creep up

and tassel like an Indian tribe

on the courthouse lawn. Pumpkins

ran out to the ends of their vines

to follow him. Ripe plums

and peaches reached into his pockets.

Flowers sprang up in his tracks

everywhere he stepped. And then

his planter’s eye fell on

that parson’s fair fine lady

again. “O holy plowman,” cried she,

“I am all grown up in weeds.

Pray, bring me back into good tilth.”

He tilled her carefully

and laid her by, and she

did bring forth others of her kind,

and others, and some more.

They sowed and reaped till all

the countryside was filled

with farmers and their brides sowing

and reaping. When they died

they became two spirits of the woods.

THE CONTRARINESS OF THE MAD FARMER

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my

inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission

to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.

I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,

and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,

and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,

in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught

so often laughing at funerals, that was because

I knew the dead were already slipping away,

preparing a comeback, and can I help it?

And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed

my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom

had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not

be resurrected by a piece of cake. “Dance,” they told me,

and I stood still, and while they stood

quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.

“Pray,” they said, and I laughed, covering myself

in the earth’s brightnesses, and then stole off gray

into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.

When they said, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,”

I told them, “He’s dead.” And when they told me,

“God is dead,” I answered, “He goes fishing every day

in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.”

When they asked me would I like to contribute

I said no, and when they had collected

more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.

When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,

and then went off by myself and did more

than they would have asked. “Well, then,” they said,

“go and organize the International Brotherhood

of Contraries,” and I said, “Did you finish killing

everybody who was against peace?” So be it.

Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest

way to come to the truth. It is one way.

THE FARMER AND THE SEA

The sea always arriving,

hissing in pebbles, is breaking

its edge where the landsman

squats on his rock. The dark

of the earth is familiar to him,

close mystery of his source

and end, always flowering

in the light and always

fading. But the dark of the sea

is perfect and strange,

the absence of any place,

immensity on the loose.

Still, he sees it is another

keeper of the land, caretaker,

shaking the earth, breaking it,

clicking the pieces, but somewhere

holding deep fields yet to rise,

shedding its richness on them

silently as snow, keeper and maker

of places wholly dark. And in him

something dark applauds.

EARTH AND FIRE

In this woman the earth speaks.

Her words open in me, cells of light

flashing in my body, and make a song

that I follow toward her out of my need.

The pain I have given her I wear

like another skin, tender, the air

around me flashing with thorns.

And yet such joy as I have given her

sings in me and is part of her song.

The winds of her knees shake me

like a flame. I have risen up from her,

time and again, a new man.

THE MAD FARMER IN THE CITY

“. . . a field woman is a portion

of the field; she has somehow lost

her own margin . . .” THOMAS HARDY

As my first blow against it, I would not stay.

As my second, I learned to live without it.

As my third, I went back one day and saw

that my departure had left a little hole

where some of its strength was flowing out,

and I heard the earth singing beneath the street.

Singing quietly myself, I followed the song

among the traffic. Everywhere I went, singing,

following the song, the stones cracked,

and I heard it stronger. I heard it strongest

in the presence of women. There was one I met

who had the music of the ground in her, and she

was its dancer. “O Exile,” I sang, “for want of you

there is a tree that has borne no leaves

and a planting season that will not turn warm.”

Looking at her, I felt a tightening of roots

under the pavement, and I turned and went

with her a little way, dancing beside her.

And I saw a black woman still inhabiting

as in a dream the space of the open fields

where she had bent to plant and gather. She stood

rooted in the music I heard, pliant and proud

as a stalk of wheat with the grain heavy. No man

with the city thrusting angles in his brain

is equal to her. To reach her he must tear it down.

Wherever lovely women are the city is undone,

its geometry broken in pieces and lifted,

its streets and corners fading like mist at sunrise

above groves and meadows and planted fields.

THE BIRTH (NEAR PORT WILLIAM)

They were into the lambing, up late.

Talking and smoking around their lantern,

they squatted in the barn door, left open

so the quiet of the winter night

diminished what they said. The chill

had begun to sink into their clothes.

Now and then they raised their hands

to breathe on them. The youngest one

yawned and shivered.

“Damn,” he said,

“I’d like to be asleep. I’d like to be

curled up in a warm nest like an old

groundhog, and sleep till spring.”

“When I was your age, Billy, it wasn’t

sleep I thought about,” Uncle Stanley said.

“Last few years here I’ve took to sleeping.”

And Raymond said: “To sleep till spring

you’d have to have a trust in things

the way animals do. Been a long time,

I reckon, since people felt safe enough

to sleep more than a night. You might

wake up someplace you didn’t go to sleep at.”

They hushed a while, as if to let the dark

brood on what they had said. Behind them

a sheep stirred in the bedding and coughed.

It was getting close to midnight.

Later they would move back along the row

of penned ewes, making sure the newborn

lambs were well dried, and had sucked,

and then they would go home cold to bed.

The barn stood between the ridgetop

and the woods along the bluff. Below

was the valley floor and the river

they could not see. They could hear

the wind dragging its underside

through the bare branches of the woods.

And suddenly the wind began to carry

a low singing. They looked across

the lantern at each other’s eyes

and saw they all had heard. They stood,

their huge shadows rising up around them.

The night had changed. They were already

on their way—dry leaves underfoot

and mud under the leaves—to another barn

on down along the woods’ edge,

an old stripping room, where by the light

of the open stove door they saw the man,

and then the woman and the child

lying on a bed of straw on the dirt floor.

“Well, look a there,” the old man said.

“First time this ever happened here.”

And Billy, looking, and looking away,

said: “Howdy. Howdy. Bad night.”

And Raymond said: “There’s a first

time, they say, for everything.”

And that

he thought, was as reassuring as anything

was likely to be, and as he needed it to be.

They did what they could. Not much.

They brought a piece of rug and some sacks

to ease the hard bed a little, and one

wedged three dollar bills into a crack

in the wall in a noticeable place.

And they stayed on, looking, looking away,

until finally the man said they were well

enough off, and should be left alone.

They went back to their sheep. For a while

longer they squatted by their lantern

and talked, tired, wanting sleep, yet stirred

by wonder—old Stanley too, though he would not

say so.

“Don’t make no difference,” he said.

“They’ll have ‘em anywhere. Looks like a man

would have a right to be born in bed, if not

die there, but he don’t.”

“But you heard

that singing in the wind,” Billy said.

“What about that?”

“Ghosts. They do that way.”

“Not that way.”

“Scared him, it did.”

The old man laughed. “We’ll have to hold

his damn hand for him, and lead him home.”

“It don’t even bother you,” Billy said.

“You go right on just the same. But you heard.”

“Now that I’m old I sleep in the dark.

That ain’t what I used to do in it. I heard

something.”

“You heard a good deal more

than you’ll understand,” Raymond said,

“or him or me either.”

They looked at him.

He had, they knew, a talent for unreasonable

belief. He could believe in tomorrow

before it became today—a human enough

failing, and they were tolerant.

He said:

“It’s the old ground trying it again.

Solstice, seeding and birth—it never

gets enough. It wants the birth of a man

to bring together sky and earth, like a stalk

of corn. It’s not death that makes the dead

rise out of the ground, but something alive

straining up, rooted in darkness, like a vine.

That’s what you heard. If you’re in the right mind

when it happens, it can come on you strong;

you might hear music passing on the wind,

or see a light where there wasn’t one before.”

“Well, how do you know if it amounts to anything?”

“You don’t. It usually don’t. It would take

a long time to ever know.”

But that night

and other nights afterwards, up late,

there was a feeling in them—familiar

to them, but always startling in its strength—

like the thought, on a winter night,

of the lambing ewes dry-bedded and fed,

and the thought of the wild creatures warm

asleep in their nests, deep underground.

AWAKE AT NIGHT

Late in the night I pay

the unrest I owe

to the life that has never lived

and cannot live now.

What the world could be

is my good dream

and my agony when, dreaming it,

I lie awake and turn

and look into the dark.

I think of a luxury

in the sturdiness and grace

of necessary things, not

in frivolity. That would heal

the earth, and heal men.

But the end, too, is part

of the pattern, the last

labor of the heart:

to learn to lie still,

one with the earth

again, and let the world go.

PRAYERS AND SAYINGS OF THE MAD FARMER

for James Baker Hall

I

It is presumptuous and irresponsible to pray for other people. A good man would pray only for himself—that he have as much good as he deserves, that he not receive more good or more evil than he deserves, that he bother nobody, that he not be bothered, that he want less. Praying thus for himself, he should prepare to live with the consequences.

II

At night make me one with the darkness.

In the morning make me one with the light.

III

If a man finds it necessary to eat garbage, he should resist the temptation to call it a delicacy.

IV

Don’t pray for the rain to stop.

Pray for good luck fishing

when the river floods.

V

Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

VI

Beware of the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

VII

Put your hands into the mire.

They will learn the kinship

of the shaped and the unshapen,

the living and the dead.

VIII

When I rise up

let me rise up joyful

like a bird.

When I fall

let me fall without regret

like a leaf.

IX

Sowing the seed,

my hand is one with the earth.

Wanting the seed to grow,

my mind is one with the light.

Hoeing the crop,

my hands are one with the rain.

Having cared for the plants,

my mind is one with the air.

Hungry and trusting,

my mind is one with the earth.

Eating the fruit,

my body is one with the earth.

X

Let my marriage by brought to the ground.

Let my love for this woman enrich the earth.

What is its happiness but preparing its place?

What is its monument but a rich field?

XI

By the excellence of his work the workman is a neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise to own the salesman is a neighbor.

By selling what is good his character survives his market.

XII

Let me wake in the night

and hear it raining

and go back to sleep.

XIII

Don’t worry and fret about the crops. After you have done all you can for them, let them stand in the weather on their own.

If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.

But the real products of any year’s work are the farmer’s mind and the cropland itself.

If he raises a good crop at the cost of belittling himself and diminishing the ground, he has gained nothing. He will have to begin over again the next spring, worse off than before.

Let him receive the season’s increment into his mind. Let him work it into the soil.

The finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer.

Make the human race a better head. Make the world a better piece of ground.

THE SATISFACTIONS OF THE MAD FARMER

Growing weather; enough rain;

the cow’s udder tight with milk;

the peach tree bent with its yield;

honey golden in the white comb;

the pastures deep in clover and grass,

enough, and more than enough;

the ground, new worked, moist

and yielding underfoot, the feet

comfortable in it as roots;

the early garden: potatoes, onions,

peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots,

radishes, marking their straight rows

with green, before the trees are leafed;

raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,

currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage,

strawberries red ripe with the white

flowers still on the vines—picked

with the dew on them, before breakfast;

grape clusters heavy under broad leaves,

powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness

—an ancient delight, delighting;

the bodies of children, joyful

without dread of their spending,

surprised at nightfall to be weary;

the bodies of women in loose cotton,

cool and closed in the evenings

of summer, like contented houses;

the bodies of men, able in the heat

and sweat and weight and length

of the day’s work, eager in their spending,

attending to nightfall, the bodies of women;

sleep after love, dreaming

white lilies blooming

coolly out of the flesh;

after sleep, enablement

to go on with work, morning a clear gift;

the maidenhood of the day,

cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass;

the work of feeding and clothing and housing,

done with more than enough knowledge

and with more than enough love,

by those who do not have to be told;

any building well built, the rafters

firm to the walls, the walls firm,

the joists without give,

the proportions clear,

the fitting exact, even unseen,

bolts and hinges that turn home

without a jiggle;

any work worthy

of the day’s maidenhood;

any man whose words

lead precisely to what exists,

who never stoops to persuasion;

the talk of friends, lightened and cleared

by all that can be assumed;

deer tracks in the wet path,

the deer sprung from them, gone on;

live streams, live shiftings

of the sun in the summer woods;

the great hollow-trunked beech,

a landmark I loved to return to,

its leaves gold-lit on the silver

branches in the fall: blown down

after a hundred years of standing,

a footbridge over the stream;

the quiet in the woods of a summer morning,

the voice of a pewee passing through it

like a tight silver wire;

a little clearing among cedars,

white clover and wild strawberries

beneath an opening to the sky

—heavenly, I thought it,

so perfect; had I foreseen it

I would have desired it

no less than it deserves;

fox tracks in snow, the impact

of lightness upon lightness,

unendingly silent.

What I know of spirit is astir

in the world. The god I have always expected

to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning,

I have always expected to be

a great relisher of this world, its good

grown immortal in his mind.

MEDITATION IN THE SPRING RAIN

In the April rain I climbed up to drink

of the live water leaping off the hill,

white over the rocks. Where the mossy root

of a sycamore cups the flow, I drank

and saw the branches feathered with green.

The thickets, I said, send up their praise

at dawn. Was that what I meant—I meant

my words to have the heft and grace, the flight

and weight of the very hill, its life

rising—or was it some old exultation

that abides with me? We’ll not soon escape

the faith of our fathers—no more than

crazy old Mrs. Gaines, whom my grandmother

remembers standing balanced eighty years ago

atop a fence in Port Royal, Kentucky,

singing: “One Lord, one Faith, and one

Cornbread.” They had a cage built for her

in a room, “nearly as big as the room, not

cramped up,” and when she grew wild

they kept her there. But mostly she went free

in the town, and they allowed the children

to go for walks with her. She strayed once

beyond where they thought she went, was lost

to them, “and they had an awful time

finding her.” For her, to be free

was only to be lost. What is it about her

that draws me on, so that my mind becomes a child

to follow after her? An old woman

when my grandmother was a girl, she must have seen

the virgin forest standing here, the amplitude

of our beginning, of which no speech

remains. Out of the town’s lost history,

buried in minds long buried, she has come,

brought back by a memory near death. I see her

in her dusky clothes, hair uncombed, the children

following. I see her wandering, muttering

to herself as her way was, among these hills

half a century before my birth, in the silence

of such speech as I know. Dawn and twilight

and dawn again trembling in the leaves

over her, she tramped the raveling verges

of her time. It was a shadowy country

that she knew, holding a darkness that was past

and a darkness to come. The fleeting lights

tattered her churchly speech to mad song.

When her poor wandering head broke the confines

of all any of them knew, they put her in a cage.

But I am glad to know it was a commodious cage,

not cramped up. And I am glad to know

that other times the town left her free

to be as she was in it, and to go her way.

May it abide a poet with as much grace!

For I too am perhaps a little mad,

standing here wet in the drizzle, listening

to the clashing syllables of the water. Surely

there is a great Word being put together here.

I begin to hear it gather in the opening

of the flowers and the leafing-out of the trees,

in the growth of bird nests in the crotches

of the branches, in the settling of the dead

leaves into the ground, in the whittling

of beetle and grub, in my thoughts

moving in the hill’s flesh. Coming here,

I crossed a place where a stream flows

underground, and the sounds of the hidden water

and the water come to light braided in my ear.

I think the maker is here, creating his hill

as it will be, out of what it was.

The thickets, I say, send up their praise

at dawn! One Lord, one Faith, and one Cornbread

forever! But hush. Wait. Be as still

as the dead and the unborn in whose silence

that old one walked, muttering and singing,

followed by the children.

For a time there

I turned away from the words I knew, and was lost.

For a time I was lost and free, speechless

in the multitudinous assembling of his Word.

THE GRANDMOTHER

Better born than married, misled,

in the heavy summers of the river bottom

and the long winters cut off by snow

she would crave gentle dainty things,

“a pretty little cookie or a cup of tea,”

but spent her days over a wood stove

cooking cornbread, kettles of jowl and beans

for the heavy, hungry, hard-handed

men she had married and mothered, bent

past unbending by her days of labor

that love had led her to. They had to break her

before she would lie down in her coffin.

THE HERON

While the summer’s growth kept me

anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river

where it flowed, faithful to its way,

beneath the slope where my household

has taken its laborious stand.

I could not reach it even in dreams.

But one morning at the summer’s end

I remember it again, as though its being

lifts into mind in undeniable flood,

and I carry my boat down through the fog,

over the rocks, and set out.

I go easy and silent, and the warblers

appear among the leaves of the willows,

their flight like gold thread

quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.

And I go on until I see, crouched

on a dead branch sticking out of the water,

a heron—so still that I believe

he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.

And then I see the articulation of feather

and living eye, a brilliance I receive

beyond my power to make, as he

receives in his great patience

the river’s providence. And then I see

that I am seen. Still as I keep,

I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.

Suddenly I know I have passed across

to a shore where I do not live.

SEPTEMBER 2, 1969

In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks

passing southward over the valley. The tall

sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks

to cold seed, by the river. And high

up the birds rose into sight against the darkening

clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading

landscapes of the sky like rags, as in

abandonment to the summons their blood knew.

And in my mind, where had stood a garden

straining to the light, there grew

an acceptance of decline. Having worked,

I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.

THE FARMER, SPEAKING OF MONUMENTS

Always, on their generation’s breaking wave,

men think to be immortal in the world,

as though to leap from water and stand

in air were simple for a man. But the farmer

knows no work or act of his can keep him

here. He remains in what he serves

by vanishing in it, becoming what he never was.

He will not be immortal in words.

All his sentences serve an art of the commonplace,

to open the body of a woman or a field

to take him in. His words all turn

to leaves, answering the sun with mute

quick reflections. Leaving their seed, his hands

have had a million graves, from which wonders

rose, bearing him no likeness. At summer’s

height he is surrounded by green, his

doing, standing for him, awake and orderly.

In autumn, all his monuments fall.

THE SORREL FILLY

The songs of small birds fade away

into the bushes after sundown,

the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.

Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters

flare in the dusk. The aged voices

of a few crickets thread the silence.

It is a quiet I love, though my life

too often drives me through it deaf.

Busy with costs and losses, I waste

the time I have to be here—a time

blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,

if only I would keep aware. The leaves

rest in the air, perfectly still.

I would like them to rest in my mind

as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,

the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,

poised there, light on the slope

as a young apple tree. A week ago

I took her away to sell, and failed

to get my price, and brought her home

again. Now in the quiet I stand

and look at her a long time, glad

to have recovered what is lost

in the exchange of something for money.

TO THE UNSEEABLE ANIMAL

My daughter: “I hope there’s an animal

somewhere that nobody has ever seen.

And I hope nobody ever sees it.”

Being, whose flesh dissolves

at our glance, knower

of the secret sums and measures,

you are always here,

dwelling in the oldest sycamores,

visiting the faithful springs

when they are dark and the foxes

have crept to their edges.

I have come upon pools

in streams, places overgrown

with the woods’ shadow,

where I knew you had rested,

watching the little fish

hang still in the flow;

as I approached they seemed

particles of your clear mind

disappearing among the rocks.

I have waked deep in the woods

in the early morning, sure

that while I slept

your gaze passed over me.

That we do not know you

is your perfection

and our hope. The darkness

keeps us near you.

THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGE

(1973)

. . . Except a corn of wheat fall into the

ground and die, it abideth alone . . .

JOHN 12:24

THE OLD ELM TREE BY THE RIVER

Shrugging in the flight of its leaves,

it is dying. Death is slowly

standing up in its trunk and branches

like a camouflaged hunter. In the night

I am wakened by one of its branches

crashing down, heavy as a wall, and then

lie sleepless, the world changed.

That is a life I know the country by.

Mine is a life I know the country by.

Willing to live and die, we stand here,

timely and at home, neighborly as two men.

Our place is changing in us as we stand,

and we hold up the weight that will bring us down.

In us the land enacts its history.

When we stood it was beneath us, and was

the strength by which we held to it

and stood, the daylight over it

a mighty blessing we cannot bear for long.

POEM

Willing to die,

you give up

your will, keep still

until, moved

by what moves

all else, you move.

BREAKING

Did I believe I had a clear mind?

It was like the water of a river

flowing shallow over the ice. And now

that the rising water has broken

the ice, I see that what I thought

was the light is part of the dark.

THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGE

1.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams

of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs

of birds opening around you as you walk.

You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

2.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said

that bound me to you, some mere promise

or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?

A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood

still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,

like the earth’s empowering brew rising

in root and branch, the words of a dream of you

I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer

who feels the solace of his native land

under his feet again and moving in his blood.

I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped

my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss

that lay before me, but only the level ground.

3.

Sometimes our life reminds me

of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing

and in that opening a house,

an orchard and garden,

comfortable shades, and flowers

red and yellow in the sun, a pattern

made in the light for the light to return to.

The forest is mostly dark, its ways

to be made anew day after day, the dark

richer than the light and more blessed,

provided we stay brave

enough to keep on going in.

4.

How many times have I come to you out of my head

with joy, if ever a man was,

for to approach you I have given up the light

and all directions. I come to you

lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes

into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend

slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace

in you, when I arrive at last.

5.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange

of my love and work for yours, so much for so much

of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—

that puts it in the dark. We are more together

than we know, how else could we keep on discovering

we are more together than we thought?

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,

and you are the known place to which the unknown is always

leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,

I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing

not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing

a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only

accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light

enough to live, and then accepts the dark,

passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I

have fallen time and again from the great strength

of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

6.

What I am learning to give you is my death

to set you free of me, and me from myself

into the dark and the new light. Like the water

of a deep stream, love is always too much. We

did not make it. Though we drink till we burst

we cannot have it all, or want it all.

In its abundance it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore

to drink our fill, and sleep, while it

flows through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us, except we keep returning

to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,

willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

7.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,

containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.

I give you the life I have let live for love of you:

a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,

the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life

that we have planted in this ground, as I

have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all

beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself

again and again, and satisfy—and this poem,

no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.

PRAYER AFTER EATING

I have taken in the light

that quickened eye and leaf.

May my brain be bright with praise

of what I eat, in the brief blaze

of motion and of thought.

May I be worthy of my meat.

HER FIRST CALF

Her fate seizes her and brings her

down. She is heavy with it. It

wrings her. The great weight

is heaved out of her. It eases.

She moves into what she has become,

sure in her fate now

as a fish free in the current.

She turns to the calf who has broken

out of the womb’s water and its veil.

He breathes. She licks his wet hair.

He gathers his legs under him

and rises. He stands, and his legs

wobble. After the months

of his pursuit of her, now

they meet face to face.

From the beginnings of the world

his arrival and her welcome

have been prepared. They have always

known each other.

KENTUCKY RIVER JUNCTION

to Ken Kesey & Ken Babbs

Clumsy at first, fitting together

the years we have been apart,

and the ways.

But as the night

passed and the day came, the first

fine morning of April,

it came clear:

the world that has tried us

and showed us its joy

was our bond

when we said nothing.

And we allowed it to be

with us, the new green

shining.

Our lives, half gone,

stay full of laughter.

Free-hearted men

have the world for words.

Though we have been

apart, we have been together.

Trying to sleep, I cannot

take my mind away.

The bright day

shines in my head

like a coin

on the bed of a stream.

You left

your welcome.

MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love somebody who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion—put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. By joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

A MARRIAGE, AN ELEGY

They lived long, and were faithful

to the good in each other.

They suffered as their faith required.

Now their union is consummate

in earth, and the earth

is their communion. They enter

the serene gravity of the rain,

the hill’s passage to the sea.

After long striving, perfect ease.

THE ARRIVAL

Like a tide it comes in,

wave after wave of foliage and fruit,

the nurtured and the wild,

out of the light to this shore.

In its extravagance we shape

the strenuous outline of enough.

A SONG SPARROW SINGING IN THE FALL

Somehow it has all

added up to song—

earth, air, rain and light,

the labor and the heat,

the mortality of the young.

I will go free of other

singing, I will go

into the silence

of my songs, to hear

this song clearly.

THE MAD FARMER MANIFESTO: THE FIRST AMENDMENT

1.

“. . . it is not too soon to provide by every

possible means that as few as possible shall be

without a little portion of land. The small

landholders are the most precious part of a state.”

Jefferson, to Reverend James Madison, October 28, 1785.

That is the glimmering vein

of our sanity, dividing from us

from the start: land under us

to steady us when we stood,

free men in the great communion

of the free. The vision keeps

lighting in my mind, a window

on the horizon in the dark.

2.

To be sane in a mad time

is bad for the brain, worse

for the heart. The world

is a holy vision, had we clarity

to see it—a clarity that men

depend on men to make.

3.

It is ignorant money I declare

myself free from, money fat

and dreaming in its sums, driving

us into the streets of absence,

stranding the pasture trees

in the deserted language of banks.

4.

And I declare myself free

from ignorant love. You easy lovers

and forgivers of mankind, stand back!

I will love you at a distance,

and not because you deserve it.

My love must be discriminate

or fail to bear its weight.

PLANTING TREES

In the mating of trees,

the pollen grain entering invisible

the domed room of the winds, survives

the ghost of the old forest

that stood here when we came. The ground

invites it, and it will not be gone.

I become the familiar of that ghost

and its ally, carrying in a bucket

twenty trees smaller than weeds,

and I plant them along the way

of the departure of the ancient host.

I return to the ground its original music.

It will rise out of the horizon

of the grass, and over the heads

of the weeds, and it will rise over

the horizon of men’s heads. As I age

in the world it will rise and spread,

and be for this place horizon

and orison, the voice of its winds.

I have made myself a dream to dream

of its rising, that has gentled my nights.

Let me desire and wish well the life

these trees may live when I

no longer rise in the mornings

to be pleased by the green of them

shining, and their shadows on the ground,

and the sound of the wind in them.

THE WILD GEESE

Horseback on Sunday morning,

harvest over, we taste persimmon

and wild grape, sharp sweet

of summer’s end. In time’s maze

over the fall fields, we name names

that went west from here, names

that rest on graves. We open

a persimmon seed to find the tree

that stands in promise,

pale, in the seed’s marrow.

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear,

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye

clear. What we need is here.

THE SILENCE

Though the air is full of singing

my head is loud

with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich

with fruit, my tongue

hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden

I cannot stand beside it

mute, but must say

“It is golden,” while the leaves

stir and fall with a sound

that is not a name.

It is in the silence

that my hope is, and my aim.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

sounds men’s silence

like a root. Let my say

and not mourn: the world

lives in the death of speech

and sings there.

ANGER AGAINST BEASTS

The hook of adrenaline shoves

into the blood. Man’s will,

long schooled to kill or have

its way, would drive the beast

against nature, transcend

the impossible in simple fury.

The blow falls like a dead seed.

It is defeat, for beasts

do not pardon, but heal or die

in the absence of the past.

The blow survives in the man.

His triumph is a wound. Spent,

he must wait the slow

unalterable forgiveness of time.

AT A COUNTRY FUNERAL

Now the old ways that have brought us

farther than we remember sink out of sight

as under the treading of many strangers

ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while

they are cast clear again upon the mind

as at a country funeral where, amid the soft

lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive

solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,

persist the usages of old neighborhood.

Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,

knowing the extremity they have come to,

one of the their own bearing to the earth the last

of his light, his darkness the sun’s definitive mark.

They stand and think as they stood and thought

when even the gods were different.

And the organ music, though decorous

as for somebody else’s grief, has its source

in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,

and on naked hillsides by the open grave,

eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,

and across the sea. How long a time?

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let my hide my

self in Thee. They came, once in time,

in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned

to the world. The fields and the work

remained to be returned to. Now the entrance

of one of the old ones into the Rock

too often means a lifework perished from the land

without inheritor, and the field goes wild

and the house sits and stares. Or it passes

at cash value into the hands of strangers.

Now the old dead wait in the open coffin

for the blood kin to gather, come home

for one last time, to hear old men

whose tongues bear an essential topography

speak memories doomed to die.

But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,

is one of the land’s seeds, as a seed

is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,

to pass on into life the knowledge

of what has died. What we owe the future

is not a new start, for we can only begin

with what has happened. We owe the future

the past, the long knowledge

that is the potency of time to come.

That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.

The community of knowing in common is the seed

of our life in this place. There is not only

no better possibility, there is no

other, except for chaos and darkness,

the terrible ground of the only possible

new start. And so as the old die and the young

depart, where shall a man go who keeps

the memories of the dead, except home

again, as one would go back after a burial,

faithful to the fields, lest the dead die

a second and more final death.

THE RECOGNITION

You put on my clothes

and it was as though

we met some other place

and I looked and knew

you. This is what we keep

going through, the lyrical

changes, the strangeness

in which I know again

what I have known before.

PLANTING CROCUSES

1.

I made an opening

to reach through blind

into time, through

sleep and silence, to new

heat, a new rising,

a yellow flower opening

in the sound of bees.

2.

Deathly was the giving

of that possibility

to a motion of the world

that would bring it

out, bright, in time.

3.

My mind pressing in

through the earth’s

dark motion toward

bloom, I thought of you,

glad there is no escape.

It is this we will be

turning and re-

turning to.

PRAISE

1.

Don’t think of it.

Vanity is absence.

Be here. Here

is the root and stem

unappraisable

on whose life

your life depends

2.

Be here

like the water

of the hill

that fills each

opening it

comes to, to leave

with a sound

that is a part

of local speech.

THE GATHERING

At my age my father

held me on his arm

like a hooded bird,

and his father held him so.

Now I grow into brotherhood

with my father as he

with his has grown,

time teaching me

his thoughts in my own.

Now he speaks in me

as when I knew him first,

as his father spoke

in him when he had come

to thirst for the life

of a young son. My son

will know me in himself

when his son sits hooded on

his arm and I have grown

to be brother to all

my fathers, memory

speaking to knowledge,

finally, in my bones.

A HOMECOMING

One faith is bondage. Two

are free. In the trust

of old love, cultivation shows

a dark graceful wilderness

at its heart. Wild

in that wilderness, we roam

the distances of our faith,

safe beyond the bounds

of what we know. O love,

open. Show me

my country. Take me home.

THE MAD FARMER’S LOVE SONG

O when the world’s at peace

and every man is free

then will I go down unto my love.

O and I may go down

several times before that.

TESTAMENT

And now to the Abbyss I pass

Of that unfathomable Grass…

1.

Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath

Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death—

A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire

His surly art of imitating life; conspire

Against him. Say that my body cannot now

Be improved upon; it has no fault to show

To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh

Has a perfection in compliance with the grass

Truer than any it could have striven for.

You will recognize the earth in me, as before

I wished to know it in myself: my earth

That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,

And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,

And all my hopes. Say that I have found

A good solution, and am on my way

To the roots. And say I have left my native clay

At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.

Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.

2.

But do not let your ignorance

Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay

You, or overwhelm your thoughts.

Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever

Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger

Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought

Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous

To me and to yourselves. Why settle

For some know-it-all’s despair

When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?

And remember that the Heavenly soil

Need not be too rich to please

One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,

A new and better man, toward

That town. The thought’s unreasonable,

But so is life, thank the Lord!

3.

So treat me, even dead,

As a man who has a place

To go, and something to do

Don’t muck up my face

With wax and powder and rouge

As one would prettify

An unalterable fact

To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth

My body is and will be,

Admit its freedom and

Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes

I wore in the day’s round.

Lay me in a wooden box.

Put the box in the ground.

4.

Beneath this stone a Berry is planted

In his home land, as he wanted.

He has come to the gathering of his kin,

Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,

But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool

By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter

Longer than the rest. After

Doing what they had to do

They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice

Look on their peace, and rejoice.

THE CLEAR DAYS

for Allen Tate

The dogs of indecision

Cross and cross the field of vision.

A cloud, a buzzing fly

Distract the lover’s eye.

Until the heart has found

Its native piece of ground

The day withholds its light,

The eye must stray unlit.

The ground’s the body’s bride,

Who will not be denied.

Not until all is given

Comes the thought of heaven.

When the mind’s an empty room

The clear days come.

SONG

I tell my love in rhyme

In a sentence that must end,

A measurable dividend,

To hold her time against time.

I praise her honest eyes

That keep their beauty clear.

I have nothing to fear

From her, though the world lies,

If I don’t lie. Though the hill

Of winter rise, a silent ark,

Our covenant with the dark,

We will speak on until

The flowers fall, and the birds

With their bright songs depart.

Then we will go without art,

Without measure, or words.

POEM FOR J.

What she made in her body is broken.

Now she has begun to bear it again.

In the house of her son’s death

his life is shining in the windows,

for she has elected to bear him again.

She did not bear him for death,

and she does not. She has taken back

into her body the seed, bitter

and joyous, of the life of a man.

In the house of the dead the windows shine

with life. She mourns, for his life was good.

She is not afraid. She is like a field

where the corn is planted, and like the rain

that waters the field, and like the young corn.

In her sorrow she renews life, in her grief

she prepares the return of joy.

She did not bear him for death, and she does not.

There was a life that went out of her to live

on its own, divided, and now she has taken it back.

She is alight with the sudden new life of death.

Perhaps it is the brightness of the dead one

being born again. Perhaps she is planting him,

like corn, in the living and in the earth.

She has taken back into her flesh,

and made light, the dark seed of her pain.

THE LONG HUNTER

Passed through the dark wall,

set foot in the unknown track,

paths locked in the minds of beasts

and in strange tongues. Footfall

led him where he did not know.

There was a dark country where

only blind trust could go.

Some joyous animal paced the woods

ahead of him and filled the air

with steepling song to make a way.

Step by step the darkness bore

the light. The shadow opened

like a pod, and from the height

he saw a place green as welcome

on whose still water the sky lay white.

AN ANNIVERSARY

What we have been becomes

The country where we are.

Spring goes, summer comes,

And in the heat, as one year

Or a thousand years before,

The fields and woods prepare

The burden of their seed

Out of time’s wound, the old

Richness of the fall. Their deed

Is renewal. In the household

Of the woods the past

Is always healing in the light,

The high shiftings of the air.

It stands upon its yield

And thrives. Nothing is lost.

What yields, though in despair,

Opens and rises in the night.

Love binds us to this term

With its yes that is crying

In our marrow to confirm

Life that only lives by dying.

Lovers live by the moon

Whose dark and light are one,

Changing without rest.

The root struts from the seed

In the earth’s dark—harvest

And feast at the edge of sleep.

Darkened, we are carried

Out of need, deep

In the country we have married.

5 / 29 / 72

CLEARING

(1977)

For Dan Wickenden

What has been spoiled through man’s fault can be

made good again through man's work. I Ching

Handles are shining where my life has passed.

My fields and walls are aching

in my shoulders. My subjects are my objects:

house, barn, beast, hill, and tree.

Reader, make no mistake. The meanings

of these must balance against their weight.

HISTORY

For Wallace Stegner

1.

The crops were made, the leaves

were down, three frosts had lain

upon the broad stone

step beneath the door;

as I walked away

the houses were shut, quiet

under their drifting smokes,

the women stooped at the hearths.

Beyond the farthest tracks

of any domestic beast

my way led me, into

a place for which I knew

no names. I went by paths

that bespoke intelligence

and memory I did not know.

Noonday held sounds of moving

water, moving air, enormous

stillness of old trees.

Though I was weary and alone,

song was near me then,

wordless and gay as a deer

lightly stepping. Learning

the landmarks and the ways

of that land, so I might

go back, if I wanted to,

my mind grew new, and lost

the backward way. I stood

at last, long hunter and child,

where this valley opened,

a word I seemed to know

though I had not heard it.

Behind me, along the crooks

and slants of my approach,

a low song sang itself,

as patient as the light.

On the valley floor the woods

grew rich: great poplars,

beeches, sycamores,

walnuts, sweet gums, lindens,

oaks. They stood apart

and open, the winter light

at rest among them. Yes,

and as I came down

I heard a little stream

pouring into the river.

2.

Since then I have arrived here

many times. I have come

on foot, on horseback, by boat,

and by machine—by earth,

water, air, and fire.

I came with axe and rifle.

I came with a sharp eye

and the price of land. I came

in bondage, and I came

in freedom not worth the name.

From the high outlook

of that first day I have come

down two hundred years

across the worked and wasted

slopes, by eroding tracks

of the joyless horsepower of greed.

Through my history’s despite

and ruin, I have come

to its remainder, and here

have made the beginning

of a farm intended to become

my art of being here.

By it I would instruct

my wants: they should belong

to each other and to this place.

Until my song comes here

to learn its words, my art

is but the hope of song.

3.

All the lives this place

has had, I have. I eat

my history day by day.

Bird, butterfly, and flower

pass through the seasons of

my flesh. I dine and thrive

on offal and old stone,

and am combined within

the story of the ground.

By this earth’s life, I have

its greed and innocence,

its violence, its peace.

Now let me feed my song

upon the life that is here

that is the life that is gone.

This blood has turned to dust

and liquefied again in stem

and vein ten thousand times.

Let what is in the flesh,

O Muse, be brought to mind.

WHERE

The field mouse flickers

once upon his shadow,

is gone. The watcher is left

in all silence, as after

thunder, or threat. And then

in the top of the sycamore

the redbird opens again

his clear song: Even

so. Even so.

Divided by little songs

these silences keep folding

back upon themselves

like long cloths put away.

They are all of the one

silence that precedes

and follows us. Too much

has fallen silent here.

There are names that rest

as silent on their stone

as fossils in creek ledges.

There are those who sleep

in graves no one remembers;

there is no language here,

now, to speak their names.

Too much of our history

will seem to have taken place

in the halls of capitals,

where the accusers have

mostly been guilty, and so

have borne witness to nothing.

Whole lives of work are buried

under leaves of thickets,

hands fallen from helves.

What was memory is dust

now, and many a story

told in shade or by the fire

is gone with the old light.

On the courthouse shelves

the facts lie mute

upon their pages, useless

nearly as the old boundary

marks—“Beginning on

the bank of the Kentucky River

at the mouth of Cane Run

at a hackberry” (1865) —

lost in the silence of

old days and voices. And yet

the land and the mind

bear the marks of a history

that they do not record.

The mind still hungers

for its earth, its bounded

and open space, the term

of its final assent. It keeps

the vision of an independent

modest abundance. It dreams

of cellar and pantry filled,

the source well husbanded.

And yet it learns care

reluctantly, and late.

It suffers plaintively from

its obligations. Long

attention to detail

is a cross it bears only

by congratulating itself.

It would like to hurry up

and get more than it needs

of several pleasant things.

It dreads all the labors

of common decency.

It recalls, with disquieting

sympathy, the motto

of a locally renowned

and long dead kinsman: “Never

set up when you can lay down.”

The land bears the scars

of minds whose history

was imprinted by no example

of a forebearing mind, corrected,

beloved. A mind cast loose

in whim and greed makes

nature its mirror, and the garden

falls with the man. Great trees

once crowded this bottomland,

so thick that when they were felled

a boy could walk a mile

along their trunks and never

set foot to ground. Where

that forest stood, the fields

grew fine crops of hay:

men tied the timothy heads

together across their horses’

withers; the mountains upstream

were wooded then, and the river

in flood renewed its fields

like the Nile. Given

a live, husbandly tradition,

that abundance might

have lasted. It did not.

One lifetime of our history

ruined it. The slopes

of the watershed were stripped

of trees. The black topsoil

washed away in the tracks

of logger and plowman.

The creeks, that once ran clear

after the heaviest rains,

ran muddy, dried in summer.

From year to year watching

from his porch, my grandfather

saw a barn roof slowly

come into sight above

a neighboring ridge as plows

and rains wore down the hill.

This little has been remembered.

For the rest, one must go

and ponder in the silence

of documents, or decipher

on the land itself the healed

gullies and the unhealed,

the careless furrows drawn

over slopes too steep to plow

where the scrub growth

stands in vision’s failure now.

Such a mind is as much

a predicament as such

a place. And yet a knowledge

is here that tenses the throat

as for song: the inheritance

of the ones, alive or once

alive, who stand behind

the ones I have imagined,

who took into their minds

the troubles of this place,

blights of love and race,

but saw a good fate here

and willingly paid its cost,

kept it the best they could,

thought of its good,

and mourned the good they lost.

THE CLEARING

For Hayden Carruth

1.

Through elm, buckeye, thorn,

box elder, redbud, whitehaw,

locust thicket, all trees

that follow man’s neglect,

through snarls and veils

of honeysuckle, tangles

of grape and bittersweet,

sing, steel, the hard song

of vision cutting in.

2.

Vision must have severity

at its edge:

against neglect,

bushes grown over the pastures,

vines riding down

the fences, the cistern broken;

against the false vision

of the farm dismembered,

sold in pieces on the condition

of the buyer’s ignorance,

a disorderly town

of “houses in the country”

inhabited by strangers;

against indifference, the tracks

of the bulldozer running

to gullies;

against weariness,

the dread of too much to do,

the wish to make desire

easy, the thought of rest.

3.

“We don’t bother nobody,

and we don’t want nobody

to bother us,” the old woman

declared fiercely

over the fence. She stood

in strange paradise:

a shack built in the blast

of sun on the riverbank,

a place under the threat of flood,

bought ignorantly, not

to be bothered. And that

is what has come of it,

“the frontier spirit,” lost

in the cities, returning now

to be lost in the country,

obscure desire floating

like a cloud upon vision:

to be free of labor,

the predicament of other lives,

not to be bothered.

4.

Vision reaches the ground

under sumac and thorn,

under the honeysuckle,

and begins its rise.

It sees clear pasture,

clover and grass, on the worn

hillside going back

to woods, good cropland

in the bottom gone to weeds.

Through time, labor, the fret

of effort, it sees

cattle on the green slope

adrift in the daily current

of hunger. And vision

moderates the saw blade,

the intelligence

and mercy of that power.

Against nature, nature

will serve well enough

a man who does not ask too much.

We leave the walnut trees,

graces of the ground

flourishing in the air.

5.

A man who does not ask too much

becomes the promise of his land.

His marriage married

to his place, he waits

and does not stray. He takes thought

for the return of the dead

to the ground that they may come

to their last avail,

for the rain

that it stay long in reach of roots,

for roots

that they bind the living

to the dead, for sleep

that it bring breath through the dark,

for love in whose keeping

bloom comes to light.

Singularity made him great

in his sight.

This union makes him small,

a part of what he would keep.

6.

As the vision of labor grows

grows the vision of rest.

Weariness is work’s shadow.

Labor is no preparation

but takes life as it goes

and casts upon it

death’s shadow, which

enough weariness may welcome.

The body’s death rises

over its daily labor,

a tree to rest beneath.

But work clarifies

the vision of rest. In rest

the vision of rest is lost.

The farm is the proper destiny,

here now and to come.

Leave the body to die

in its time, in the final dignity

that knows no loss in the fallen

high horse of the bones.

7.

In the predicament of other lives

we become mothers of calves,

teaching them, against nature,

to suck a bucket’s valved nipple,

caring for them like life

itself to make them complete

animals, independent

of the tit. Fidelity

reaches through the night

to the triumph of their lives,

bawling in the cold barn before

daylight—to become, eaten,

the triumph of other lives

perhaps not worthy of them,

eaters who will recognize

only their own lives

in their daily meat.

But no matter. Life

must be served. Wake up,

leave the bed, dress

in the cold room, go under

stars to the barn, come

to the greetings of hunger,

the breath a pale awning

in the dark. Feed

the lives that feed

lives.

When one sickens

do not let him die. Hold out

against the simple flesh

that would let its life go

in the cold night. While he lives

a thought belongs to him

that will not rest. And then

accept the relief of death.

Drag the heedless carcass

out of the stall, fling it

in the bushes, let it

lie. Hunger will find it,

the bones divide by stealth,

the black head with its star

drift into the hill.

8.

Street, guns, machines,

quicker fortunes, quicker deaths

bear down on these

hills whose winter trees

keep like memories

the nests of birds. The arrival

may be complete in my time,

and I will see the end

of names. The history

of lives will end then,

the building and wearing away

of earth and flesh will end,

and the history of numbers

will begin. Then why clear

yet again an old farm

scarred by the lack of sight

that scars our souls?

The struggle is on, no

mistake, and I take

the side of life’s history

against the coming of numbers.

Make clear what was overgrown.

Cut the brush, drag it

through sumac and briars, pile it,

clear the old fence rows,

the trash dump, stop

the washes, mend the galls,

fence and sow the fields,

bring cattle back to graze

the slopes, bring crops back

to the bottomland. Here

where the time of rain is kept

take what is half ruined

and make it clear, put it

back in mind.

9.

February. A cloudy day

foretelling spring by its warmth

though snow will follow.

You are at work in the worn field

returning now to thought.

The sorrel mare eager

to the burden, you are dragging

cut brush to the pile,

moving in ancestral motions

of axe-stroke, bending

to log chain and trace, speaking

immemorial bidding and praise

to the mare’s fine ears.

And you pause to rest

in the quiet day while the mare’s

sweated flanks steam.

You stand in a clearing whose cost

you know in tendon and bone.

A kingfisher utters

his harsh cry, rising

from the leafless river.

Again, again, the old

is newly come.

10.

We pile the brush high,

a pyre of cut trees,

not to burn as the way

once was, but to rot and cover

an old scar of the ground.

The dead elm, its stump

and great trunk too heavy to move,

we give to the riddance of fire.

Two days, two nights

it burns, white ash falling

from it light as snow.

It goes into the air.

What bore the wind

the wind will bear.

11.

An evening comes

when we finish work and go,

stumblers under the folding sky,

the field clear behind us.

WORK SONG

I. A Lineage

By the fall of years I learn how it has been

With Jack Beechum, Mat Feltner, Elton Penn,

And their kind, men made for their fields.

I see them stand their ground, bear their yields,

Swaying in all weathers in their long rows,

In the dance that fleshes desire and then goes

Down with the light. They have gone as they came,

And they go. They go by a kind of will. They claim

In the brevity of their strength an ancient joy.

“Make me know it! Hand it to me, boy!”

2. A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,

if we will make our seasons welcome here,

asking not too much of earth or heaven,

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows. The river will run

clear, as we will never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be

green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground. They will take

nothing from the ground they will not return,

whatever the grief at parting. Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.

3. A Beginning

October’s completing light falls

on the unfinished patterns of my year.

The sun is yellow in a smudge

of public lies we no longer try

to believe. Speech finally drives us

to silence. Power has weakened us.

Comfort wakens us in fear. We are

a people who must decline or perish.

I have let my mind at last bend down

where human vision begins its rise

in the dark of seeds, wombs of beasts.

It has carried my hands to roots

and foundings, to the mute urging

that in human care clears the field

and turns it green. It reaches

the silence at the tongue’s root

in which speech begins. In early mist

I walk in these reopening fields

as in a forefather’s dream. In dream

and sweat the fields have seasoning.

Let my words then begin in labor.

Let me sing a work song

and an earth song. Let the song of light

fall upon me as it may.

The end of this is not in sight.

And I come to the waning of the year

weary, the way long.

FROM THE CREST

1.

What we leave behind to sleep

is ahead of us when we wake.

Cleared, the field must be

kept clear. There are more

clarities to make.

The farm is an infinite form.

Thinking of what may come,

I wake up in the night

and cannot go back to sleep.

The future swells in the dark,

too large a room for one

man to sleep well in.

I think of the work at hand.

Before spring comes again

there is another pasture

to clear and sow, for an end

I desire but cannot know.

Now in the silent keep

of stars and of my work

I lay me down to sleep.

2.

The deepest sleep holds us

to something immutable.

We have fallen

into place, and harmony

surrounds us. We are carried

in the world, in the company

of stars. But as dawn comes

I feel the waking of my hunger

for another day. I weave

round it again the kindling

tapestry of desire.

3.

My life’s wave is at its crest.

The thought of work becomes

a friend of the thought of rest.

I see how little avail

one man is, and yet I would not

be a man sitting still,

no little song of desire

traveling the mind’s dark woods.

I am trying to teach my mind

to bear the long, slow growth

of the fields, and to sing

of its passing while it waits.

The farm must be made a form,

endlessly bringing together

heaven and earth, light

and rain building, dissolving,

building back again

the shapes and actions of the ground.

If it is to be done,

not of the body, not of the will

the strength will come,

but of delight that moves

lovers in their loves,

that moves the sun and stars,

that stirs the leaf, and lifts

the hawk in flight.

From the crest of the wave

the grave is in sight,

the soul’s last deep track

in the known. Past there

it gives up roof and fire,

board, bed, and word.

It returns to the wild,

where nothing is done by hand.

I am trying to teach

my mind to accept the finish

that all good work must have:

of hands touching me,

days and weathers passing

over me, the smooth of love,

the wearing of the earth.

At the final stroke

I will be a finished man.

4.

Little farm, motherland, made

by what has nearly been your ruin,

when I speak to you, I speak

to myself, for we are one

body. When I speak to you,

I speak to wife, daughter, son,

whom you have fleshed in your flesh.

And speaking to you, I speak

to all that brotherhood that rises

daily in your substance

and walks, burrows, flies, stands:

plants and beasts whose lives

loop like dolphins through your sod.

5.

Going into the city, coming

home again, I keep you

always in my mind.

Who knows me who does not

know you? The crowds of the streets

do not know that you

are passing among them with me.

They think I am simply a man,

made of a job and clothes

and education. They do not

see who is with me,

or know the resurrection

by which we have come

from the dead. In the city

we must be seemly and quiet

as becomes those who travel

among strangers. But do not

on that account believe

that I am ashamed

to acknowledge you, my friend.

We will write them a poem

to tell them of the great

membership, the mystic order,

to which both of us belong.

6.

When I think of death I see

that you are but a passing thought

poised upon the ground,

held in place

by vision, love, and work,

all as passing as a thought.

7.

Beginning and end

thread these fields like a net.

Nosing and shouldering,

the field mouse pats

his anxious routes through the grass,

the mole his cool ones

among the roots; the air

is tensely woven of bird flight,

fluttery at night with bats;

the mind of the honeybee

is the map of bloom.

Like a man, the farm is headed

for the woods. The wild

is already veined in it

everywhere, its thriving.

To love these things one did not

intend is to be a friend

to the beginning and the end.

8.

And when we speak together,

love, our words rise

like leaves, out of our fallen

words. What we have said

becomes an earth we live on

like two trees, whose sheddings

enrich each other, making

both the source of each.

When we love, the green

stalks and downturned bells

of lilies grow from our flesh.

Dreams and visions flower

from those beds our bodies are.

9.

The farm travels in snow,

a little world flying

through the Milky Way.

The flakes all fall

into place. But already

the mind begins to shift

its light, clearing space

to receive anew the old fate

of spring. In all the fields

and woods, old work calls

to new. The dead and living

prepare again to mate.

10.

Let the great song come

that sways the branches, that weaves

the nest of the vireo,

that the ground squirrel dreams

in his deep sleep, and wakes,

that the fish hear, that pipes

the minnows over

the shoals. In snow I wait

and sing of the braided

song I only partly hear.

Even in the rising year,

even in the spring,

the little can hope to sing

only in praise of the great.

A PART

(1980)

To my mother, who gave me books

STAY HOME

I will wait here in the fields

to see how well the rain

brings on the grass.

In the labor of the fields

longer than a man’s life

I am at home. Don’t come with me.

You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods

where the old trees

move only with the wind

and then with gravity.

In the stillness of the trees

I am at home. Don’t come with me.

You stay home too.

TO GARY SNYDER

After we saw the wild ducks

and walked away, drawing out

the quiet that had held us,

in wonder of them and of ourselves,

Den said, “I wish Mr. Snyder

had been here.” And I said, “Yes.”

But it cannot be often as it was

when we heard geese in the air

and ran out of the house to see them

wavering in long lines, high,

southward, out of sight.

By division we speak, out of wonder.

FOR THE HOG KILLING

Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the eye,

let them die while the sound of the shot is in the air, let them die as they fall,

let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let its freshet be full,

let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around,

for today we celebrate again our lives’ wedding with the world,

for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond.

GOODS

It’s the immemorial feelings

I like the best: hunger, thirst,

their satisfaction; work-weariness,

earned rest; the falling again

from loneliness to love;

the green growth the mind takes

from the pastures in March;

The gayety in the stride

of a good team of Belgian mares

that seems to shudder from me

through all my ancestry.

THE ADZE

I came out to the barn lot

near nightfall, past supper time,

where he stood at work still

with the adze, that had to be

finely used or it would wound

the user—a lean old man

whose passion was to know

what a man could do in a day

and how a tool empowered the hand.

He paused to warn: stay back

from what innocence made dangerous.

I stayed back, and he went on

with what he had to do

while dark fell round him.

THE COLD PANE

Between the living world

and the world of death

is a clear, cold pane;

a man who looks too close

must fog it with his breath,

or hold his breath too long.

FALLING ASLEEP

Raindrops on the tin roof.

What do they say?

We have all

Been here before.

A PURIFICATION

At start of spring I open a trench

in the ground. I put into it

the winter’s accumulation of paper,

pages I do not want to read

again, useless words, fragments,

errors. And I put into it

the contents of the outhouse:

light of the sun, growth of the ground,

finished with one of their journeys.

To the sky, to the wind, then,

and to the faithful trees, I confess

my sins: that I have not been happy

enough, considering my good luck;

have listened to too much noise;

have been inattentive to wonders;

have lusted after praise.

And then upon the gathered refuse

of mind and body, I close the trench,

folding shut again the dark,

the deathless earth. Beneath that seal

the old escapes into the new.

A DANCE

The stepping-stones, once

in a row along the slope,

have drifted out of line,

pushed by frosts and rains.

Walking is no longer thoughtless

over them, but alert as dancing,

as tense and poised, to step

short, and long, and then

longer, right, and then left.

At the winter’s end, I dance

the history of its weather.

THE FEAR OF LOVE

I come to the fear of love

as I have often come,

to what must be desired

and to what must be done.

Only love can quiet the fear

of love, and only love can save

from diminishment the love

that we must lose to have.

We stand as in an open field,

blossom, leaf, and stem,

rooted and shaken in our day,

heads nodding in the wind.

SEVENTEEN YEARS

They are here again,

the locusts I baited my lines with

in the summer we married.

The light is filled

with the song the ground exhales

once in seventeen years.

And we are here with the wear

and the knowledge of those years,

understanding the song

of locusts no better than then,

knowing the future no more than they

who give themselves so long

to the dark. What can we say,

who grow older in love?

Marriage is not made

but in dark time, in the rhymes,

the returns of song,

that mark time’s losses.

They open our eyes

to the dark, and we marry again.

5 / 29 / 74

TO WHAT LISTENS

I come to it again

and again, the thought of the wren

opening his song here

to no human ear—

no woman to look up,

no man to turn his head.

The farm will sink then

from all we have done and said.

Beauty will lie, fold

on fold, upon it. Foreseeing

it so, I cannot withhold

love. But from the height

and distance of foresight,

how well I like it

as it is! The river shining,

the bare trees on the bank,

the house set snug

as a stone in the hill’s flank,

the pasture behind it green.

Its songs and loves throb

in my head till like the wren

I sing—to what listens—again.

WOODS

I part the out thrusting branches

and come in beneath

the blessed and the blessing trees.

Though I am silent

there is singing around me.

Though I am dark

there is vision around me.

Though I am heavy

there is flight around me.

THE LILIES

Hunting them, a man must sweat, bear

the whine of a mosquito in his ear,

grow thirsty, tired, despair perhaps

of ever finding them, walk a long way.

He must give himself over to chance,

for they live beyond prediction.

He must give himself over to patience,

for they live beyond will. He must be led

along the hill as by a prayer.

If he finds them anywhere, he will find

a few, paired on their stalks,

at ease in the air as souls in bliss.

I found them here at first without hunting,

by grace, as all beauties are first found.

I have hunted and not found them here.

Found, unfound, they breathe their light

into the mind, year after year.

FORTY YEARS

Life is your privilege, not your belonging.

It is the loss of it, now, that you will be singing.

A MEETING

In a dream I meet

my dead friend. He has,

I know, gone long and far,

and yet he is the same

for the dead are changeless.

They grow no older.

It is I who have changed,

grown strange to what I was.

Yet I, the changed one,

ask: “How you been?”

He grins and looks at me.

“I been eating peaches

off some mighty fine trees.”

ANOTHER DESCENT

Through the weeks of deep snow

we walked above the ground

on fallen sky, as though we did

not come of root and leaf, as though

we had only air and weather

for our difficult home.

But now

as March warms, and the rivulets

run like birdsong on the slopes,

and the branches of light sing in the hills,

slowly we return to earth.

BELOW

Above trees and rooftops

is the range of symbols:

banner, cross, and star;

air war, the mode of those

who live by symbols; the pure

abstraction of travel by air.

Here a spire holds up

an angel with trump and wings;

he’s in his element.

Another lifts a hand

with forefinger pointing up

to admonish that all’s not here.

All’s not. But I aspire

downward. Flyers embrace

the air, and I’m a man

who needs something to hug.

All my dawns cross the horizon

and rise, from underfoot.

What I stand for

is what I stand on.

THE STAR

Flying at night, above the clouds, all earthmarks spurned,

lost in Heaven, where peaceful entry must be earned,

I have no pleasure here, nothing to desire.

And then I see one light below there like a star.

THE HIDDEN SINGER

The gods are less

for their love of praise.

Above and below them all

is a spirit that needs

nothing but its own

wholeness,

its health and ours.

It has made all things

by dividing itself.

It will be whole again.

To its joy we come

together—the seer

and the seen, the eater

and the eaten, the lover

and the loved.

In our joining it knows

itself. It is with us then,

not as the gods

whose names crest

in unearthly fire,

but as a little bird

hidden in the leaves

who sings quietly

and waits

and sings.

THE NECESSITY OF FAITH

True harvests no mere intent may reap.

Finally we must lie down to sleep

And leave the world, all we desire

To darkness, malevolence, and fire.

Who wakes and stands his shadow’s mark

Has passed by mercy through the dark.

We save the good, lovely, and bright

By will in part, in part delight;

But they live through the night by grace

That no intention can efface.

TO THE HOLY SPIRIT

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,

Who in necessity and in bounty wait,

Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken,

By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.

RIPENING

The longer we are together

the larger death grows around us.

How many we know by now

who are dead! We, who were young,

now count the cost of having been.

And yet as we know the dead

we grow familiar with the world.

We, who were young and loved each other

ignorantly, now come to know

each other in love, married

by what we have done, as much

as by what we intend. Our hair

turns white with our ripening

as though to fly away in some

coming wind, bearing the seed

of what we know. It was bitter to learn

that we come to death as we come

to love, bitter to face

the just and solving welcome

that death prepares. But that is bitter

only to the ignorant, who pray

it will not happen. Having come

the bitter way to better prayer, we have

the sweetness of ripening. How sweet

to know you by the signs of this world!

THE WAY OF PAIN

1.

For parents, the only way

is hard. We who give life

give pain. There is no help.

Yet we who give pain

give love, by pain we learn

the extremity of love.

2.

I read of Abraham’s sacrifice

the Voice required of him,

so that he led to the altar

and the knife his only son.

The beloved life was spared

that time, but not the pain.

It was the pain that was required.

3.

I read of Christ crucified,

the only begotten Son

sacrificed to flesh and time

and all our woe. He died

and rose, but who does not tremble

for his pain, his loneliness,

and the darkness of the sixth hour?

Unless we grieve like Mary

at His grave, giving Him up

as lost, no Easter morning comes.

4.

And then I slept, and dreamed

the life of my only son

was required of me, and I

must bring him to the edge

of pain, not knowing why.

I woke, and yet that pain

was true. It brought his life

to the full in me. I bore him

suffering, with love like the sun,

too bright, unsparing, whole.

WE WHO PRAYED AND WEPT

We who prayed and wept

for liberty from kings

and the yoke of liberty

accept the tyranny of things

we do not need.

In plentitude too free,

we have become adept

beneath the yoke of greed.

Those who will not learn

in plenty to keep their place

must learn it by their need

when they have had their way

and the fields spurn their seed.

We have failed Thy grace.

Lord, I flinch and pray,

send Thy necessity.

GRIEF

The morning comes. The old woman, a spot

of soot where she has touched her cheek, tears

on her face, builds a fire, sets water to boil,

puts the skillet on. The man in his middle years,

bent by the work he has done toward the work

he will do, weeps as he eats, bread in his mouth,

tears on his face. They shape the day for its passing

as if absent from it—for what needs care, caring,

feeding what must be fed. To keep them, there are only

the household’s remembered ways, etched thin

and brittle by their tears. It is a sharp light

that lights the day now. It seems to shine,

beyond eyesight, also in another day

where the dead have risen and are walking

away, their backs forever turned. What

look is in their eyes? What do they say

as they walk into the fall and flow of light?

It seems that they must know where they are going.

And the living must go with them, not knowing,

a little way. And the dead go on, not turning,

knowing, but not saying. And the living

turn back to their day, their grieving and staying.

FALL

for Wallace Fowlie

The wild cherries ripen, black and fat,

Paradisal fruits that taste of no man’s sweat.

Reach up, pull down the laden branch, and eat;

When you have learned their bitterness, they taste sweet.

AN AUTUMN BURNING

for Kenneth Rexroth

In my line of paperwork

I have words to burn: leaves

of fallen information, wasted

words of my own. I know a light

that hastens on the dark

some work deserves—which God forgive

as we must hope. I start the blaze

and observe the fire’s superlative

hunger for literature. It touches pages

like a connoisseur, turns them.

None can endure. After the passing

of that light, there is sunlight

on the ash, in the distance singing

of crickets and of birds. I turn,

unburdened, to life beyond words.

A WARNING TO MY READERS

Do not think me gentle

because I speak in praise

of gentleness, or elegant

because I honor the grace

that keeps this world. I am

a man crude as any,

gross of speech, intolerant,

stubborn, angry, full

of fists and furies. That I

may have spoken well

at times, is not natural.

A wonder is what it is.

CREATION MYTH

This is a story handed down.

It is about the old days when Bill

and Florence and a lot of their kin

lived in the little tin-roofed house

beside the woods, below the hill.

Mornings, they went up the hill

to work, Florence to the house,

the men and boys to the field.

Evenings, they all came home again.

There would be talk then and laughter

and taking of ease around the porch

while the summer night closed.

But one night, McKinley, Bill’s younger brother,

stayed away late, and it was dark

when he started down the hill.

Not a star shone, not a window.

What he was going down into was

the dark, only his footsteps sounding

to prove he trod the ground. And Bill

who had got up to cool himself,

thinking and smoking, leaning on

the jamb of the open front door,

heard McKinley coming down,

and heard his steps beat faster

as he came, for McKinley felt the pasture’s

darkness joined to all the rest

of darkness everywhere. It touched

the depths of woods and sky and grave.

In that huge dark, things that usually

stayed put might get around, as fish

in pond or slue get loose in flood.

Oh, things could be coming close

that never had come close before.

He missed the house and went on down

and crossed the draw and pounded on

where the pasture widened on the other side,

lost then for sure. Propped in the door,

Bill heard him circling, a dark star

in the dark, breathing hard, his feet

blind on the little reality

that was left. Amused, Bill smoked

his smoke, and listened. He knew where

McKinley was, though McKinley didn’t.

Bill smiled in the darkness to himself,

and let McKinley run until his steps

approached something really to fear:

the quarry pool. Bill quit his pipe

then, opened the screen, and stepped out,

barefoot, on the warm boards. “McKinley!”

he said, and laid the field out clear

under McKinley’s feet, and placed

the map of it in his head.

THE FIRST

The first man who whistled

thought he had a wren in his mouth.

He went around all day

with his lips puckered,

afraid to swallow.

WALKING ON THE RIVER ICE

A man could be a god

if the ice wouldn’t melt

and he could stand the cold.

THROWING AWAY THE MAIL

Nothing is simple,

not even simplification.

Thus, throwing away

the mail, I exchange

the complexity of duty

for the simplicity of guilt.

EXCEPT

Now that you have gone

and I am alone and quiet,

my contentment would be

complete, if I did not wish

you were here so I could say,

“How good it is, Tanya,

to be alone and quiet.”

FOR THE FUTURE

Planting trees early in spring,

we make a place for birds to sing

in time to come. How do we know?

They are singing here now.

There is no other guarantee

that singing will ever be.

TRAVELING AT HOME

Even in a country you know by heart

it’s hard to go the same way twice.

The life of the going changes.

The chances change and make a new way.

Any tree or stone or bird

can be the bud of a new direction. The

natural correction is to make intent

of accident. To get back before dark

is the art of going.

JULY, 1773

Seventeen seventy one

and two. In those years the fame

of the Long Hunters passed back

through the settlements, with news

of a rich and delightful country

to the west, on the waters of the Ohio.

My father and uncles held council

over their future prospects.

In the vigor of manhood and full

of enterprise, they longed to see

for themselves. They could not remain

confined in the sterile mountains

of Virginia, where only small parcels

of fertile land and could be found

at any one place. As soldiers

of the Indian Wars, each had

from the governor a grant

of four hundred acres, which had only

to be located and surveyed.

And so,

having first planted their corn

about the tenth of May

in the year 1773, they set out

to visit this land of promise,

five of them, taking along

Sam Adams, a neighbor’s son,

nineteen years of age.

They sought their future homes,

their fortunes, and the honor

of being among the first

in that western wilderness.

They reached the Great Kanahway,

then known as New River,

about the middle of May.

Having sent back their horses,

they selected suitable trees,

felled them, hollowed the trunks,

and so made two canoes

to carry them and their baggage:

rifles, ammunition, tomahawks,

butcher knives, blankets,

fishing tackle, and gigs.

And then, after their rough

overland passage on horseback,

how lightly and quietly they passed

over the surface of the water,

their prows breaking the reflections

of the trees in the early morning.

They entered the Ohio on

the first of June, the opening

of light on that wide water,

its stillness and solitudes.

Opposite the mouth of the Scotia

they saw an old French town

of nineteen or twenty houses,

hewed logs and clapboard roofs,

vacant and deserted, small

and silent among the great trees.

On June thirteenth, a Sunday,

they were met by the bearer of a letter

“to the gentleman settlers”

from Richard Butler, a white man

who had lived at Chilicothe

with the Shawanoes several years:

“They claim an absolute rite

to all that country that you

are about to settle. It does not

lie in the power of those

who sold it to give this land.

Show a friendly countenance

to your present neighbors, the Shawanoes.

It lies in your power to have

good neighbors or bad, as they

are a people very capable

of discerning between good treatment

and ill. They expect you

to be friendly with them,

and to endeavor to restrain

the hunters from destroying the game.”

And this they took to show

the means by which an All-wise

Providence opened the way

for exploitation and settlement.

They camped on July fourth

at Big Bone Lick.

“It was a wonder to see

the large bones that lies there

which has been of several

large big creatures.”

They used the short joints

of the backbones for stools,

and the ribs for tent poles

to stretch their blankets on.

Here they met a Delaware

about seventy years old.

Did he know anything

about these bones? He replied

that when he was a boy “they

were just so as you now see them.”

And so they had come to a place

of mystery; they could not

enter except in awe.

At daylight on the morning

of July eighth, they reached

the mouth of the Kentucky River,

which they called the Lewvisa.

This was the foretold stream

that would carry them southward

into the heart of promise.

They set against its current,

reaching by nightfall the mouth

of a stream they called Eagle Creek

for the eagles they saw hovering

there, in the evening light.

And the next day went on

to the mouth of what is now

Drennon Creek, where the river

was nearly closed by a stone bar,

and there they left their boats.

They crossed a bottomland

through a forest of beech trees,

gray trunks in the shade

of gold-green foliage,

and after a mile came to

“a salt lick which was

a wonder to see—a mile

in length and one hundred yards

in breadth, & the roads that came

to that lick no man would believe

who did not see, & the woods

around that place were trod

for many miles, that there

was not as much food

as would feed one sheep.”

They encountered there great numbers

of buffalo, elk, deer,

beaver, wolves, and bears.

The commotion of the herds was astonishing,

their tramplings and outcries,

the flies and the dust. There

where the salts of the ground flowed

to the light, the living blood

of that country gathered, throve

in its seasonal pulse—such

a gathering of beasts as these men

had never seen. Through the nights

they heard them, dreamed them,

seeming to comprehend them

more clearly in dream

than in eyesight, for that upwelling

and abounding, unbidden by any

man, was powerful, bright,

and brief for men like these,

as a holy vision. Waking,

they could not keep it. They did not.

Five days and six

nights they camped there,

examining the lick, killing

game, making several

surveys of land. The uplands

around the lick they found

“very good, mostly

oak timber; a great many

small creeks and branches;

scarce as much water

among them all as would

save a man’s life

while he traveled across them.”

One day, engaged in this work,

Uncle James and his neighbor’s

son, Sam Adams, were passing

round the outskirts of the lick,

where had gathered a large herd

of the buffalo. The beasts

pressed together for the salt,

stomped, coughed, suckled

their calves, the dust rising

over their humps and horns,

their tails busy at flies.

They minded less than flies

the two men who moved

around them, thinking of other

lives, times to come.

And yet Sam Adams, boylike

perhaps, though he was nineteen

and a man in other ways,

would be diverted from his work

to gaze at the buffalo,

more numerous than all

his forefather’s cattle, oblivious

abundance, there by no man’s

will—godly, he might

have thought it, had he not

thought God a man.

And why

he shot into the herd

is a question he did not answer,

anyhow until afterwards,

if at all—if he asked at all.

He saw an amplitude

so far beyond his need

he could not imagine it,

and could not let it be.

He shot.

And the herd, unskilled

in fear of such a weapon

or such a creature, ran

in clumsy terror directly

toward the spot where the boy

and the man were standing.

Agile, the boy sprang

into a leaning mulberry.

Not so young, or active,

or so used to haste,

Uncle James took shelter

behind a young hickory

whose girth was barely larger

than his own.

Then it seemed

the earth itself rose,

gathered, fled past them.

The great fall of hooves shook

ground and tree. Leaves

trembled in the one sound.

Dust hid everything

from everything. Bodies

beat against each other

in heavy flight. Black horns

sheared bark from the hickory

that protected Uncle James.

It fled. The hectic pulse

died in the ground. The dust

thinned. Day returned,

as it seemed, after nightmare.

And there was Sam Adams

looking out of his tree

at Uncle James, who looked

back, his hat now tilted.

“My good boy, you must not

venture that again.”

And they walked southeast from there

two days, some thirty miles,

left a tomahawk and fish gig

at a fine spring, and marked

a gum sapling at that place.

(This poem makes extensive borrowings

from various accounts of the McAfee

brothers’ 1773 expedition into Kentucky.)

THE SLIP

for Donald Davie

The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.

Where the great slip gave way in the bank

and an acre disappeared, all human plans

dissolve. An aweful clarification occurs

where a place was. Its memory breaks

from what is known now, begins to drift.

Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness

widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.

As before the beginning, nothing is there.

Human wrong is in the cause, human

ruin in the effect—but no matter;

all will be lost, no matter the reason.

Nothing, having arrived, will stay.

The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon

passeth it away. And yet this nothing

is the seed of all—the clear eye

of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.

Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect

begins its struggle to return. The good gift

begins again to return. The good gift

begins again its descent. The maker moves

in the unmade, stirring the water until

it clouds, dark beneath the surface,

stirring and darkening the soul until pain

perceives new possibility. There is nothing

to do but learn and wait, return to work

on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.

Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

HORSES

When I was a boy here,

traveling the fields for pleasure,

the farms were worked with teams.

As late as then a teamster

was thought an accomplished man,

his art an essential discipline.

A boy learned it by delight

as he learned to use

his body, following the example

of men. The reins of a team

were put into my hands

when I thought the work was play.

And in the corrective gaze

of men now dead I learned

to flesh my will in power

great enough to kill me

should I let it turn.

I learned the other tongue

by which men spoke to beasts

—all its terms and tones.

And by the time I learned,

new ways had changed the time.

The tractors came. The horses

stood in the fields, keepsakes,

grew old, and died. Or were sold

as dogmeat. Our minds received

the revolution of engines, our will

stretched toward the numb endurance

of metal. And that old speech

by which we magnified

our flesh in other flesh

fell dead in our mouths.

The songs of the world died

in our ears as we went within

the uproar of the long syllable

of the motors. Our intent entered

the world as combustion.

Like our travels, our workdays

burned upon the world,

lifting its inwards up

in fire. Veiled in that power

our minds gave up the endless

cycle of growth and decay

and took the unreturning way,

the breathless distance of iron.

But that work, empowered by burning

the world’s body, showed us

finally the world’s limits

and our own. We had then

the life of a candle, no longer

the ever-returning song

among the grassblades and the leaves.

Did I never forget?

Or did I, after years,

remember? To hear that song

again, though brokenly

in the distances of memory,

is coming home. I came to

a farm, some of it unreachable

by machines, as some of the world

will always be. And so

I came to a team, a pair

of mares—sorrels, with white

tails and manes, beautiful!—

to keep my sloping fields.

Going behind them, the reins

tight over their backs as they stepped

their long strides, revived

again on my tongue the cries

of dead men in the living

fields. Now every move

answers what is still.

This work of love rhymes

living and dead. A dance

is what this plodding is,

a song, whatever is said.

THE WHEEL

(1982)

It needs a more refined perception to recognize throughout this stupendous wealth of varying shapes and forms the principle of stability. Yet this principle dominates. It dominates by means of an ever-recurring cycle . . . repeating itself silently and ceaselessly . . . . This cycle is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

An eastern religion calls this cycle the Wheel of Life and no better name could be given to it. The revolutions of this Wheel never falter and are perfect. Death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.

Sir Albert Howard,

The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture

I

OWEN FLOOD / JANUARY 13, 1920–MARCH 27,1974

REQUIEM

1.

We will see no more

the mown grass fallen behind him

on the still ridges before night,

or hear him laughing in the crop rows,

or know the order of his delight.

Though the green fields are my delight,

elegy is my fate. I have come to be

survivor of many and of much

that I love, that I won’t live to see

come again into this world.

Things that mattered to me once

won’t matter any more,

for I have left the safe shore

where magnificence of art

could suffice my heart.

2.

In the day of his work

when the grace of the world

was upon him, he made his way,

not turning back or looking aside,

light in his stride.

Now may the grace of death

be upon him, his spirit blessed

in deep song of the world

and the stars turning, the seasons

returning, and long rest.

ELEGY

1.

To be at home on its native ground

the mind must go down below its horizon,

descend below the lightfall

on ridge and steep and valley floor

to receive the lives of the dead. It must wake

in their sleep, who wake in its dreams.

“Who is here?” On the rock road between

creek and woods in the fall of the year,

I stood and listened. I heard the cries

of little birds high in the wind.

And then the beat of old footsteps

came around me, and my sight was changed.

I passed through the lens of darkness

as through a furrow, and the dead

gathered to meet me. They knew me,

but looked in wonder at the lines in my face,

the white hairs sprinkled on my head.

I saw a tall old man leaning

upon a cane, his open hand

raised in some fierce commendation,

knowledge of long labor in his eyes;

another, a gentler countenance,

smiling beneath a brim of sweaty felt

in welcome to me as before.

I saw an old woman, a saver

of little things, whose lonely grief

was the first I knew; and one bent

with age and pain, whose busy hands

worked out a selflessness of love.

Those were my teachers. And there were more,

beloved of face and name, who once bore

the substance of our common ground.

Their eyes, having grieved all grief, were clear.

2.

I saw one standing aside, alone,

weariness in his shoulders, his eyes

bewildered yet with the newness

of his death. In my sorrow I felt,

as many times before, gladness

at the sight of him. “Owen,” I said.

He turned—lifted, tilted his hand.

I handed him a clod of earth

picked up in a certain well-known field.

He kneaded it in his palm and spoke:

“Wendell, this is not a place

for you and me.” And then he grinned;

we recognized his stubbornness—

it was his principle to doubt

all ease of satisfaction.

“The crops are in the barn,” I said,

“the morning frost has come to the fields,

and I have turned back to accept,

if I can, what none of us could prevent.”

He stood, remembering, weighing the cost

of the division we had come to,

his fingers resting on the earth

he held cupped lightly in his palm.

It seemed to me then that he cast off

his own confusion, and assumed

for one last time, in one last kindness,

the duty of the older man.

He nodded his head. “The desire I had

in early morning and in spring,

I never wore it out. I had

the desire, if I had had the strength.

But listen—what we prepared

to have, we have.”

He raised his eyes.

“Look,” he said.

3.

We stood on a height,

woods above us, and below

on the half-mowed slope we saw ourselves

as we once were: a young man mowing,

a boy grubbing with an axe.

It was an old abandoned field,

long overgrown with thorns and briars.

We made it new in the heat haze

of that midsummer: he, proud

of the ground intelligence clarified,

and I, proud in his praise.

“I wish,” I said, “that we could be

back in that good time again.”

“We are back there again, today

and always. Where else would we be?”

He smiled, looked at me, and I knew

it was my mind he led me through.

He spoke of some infinitude

of thought.

He led me to another

slope beside another woods,

this lighted only by stars. Older

now, the man and the boy lay

on their backs in deep grass, quietly

talking. In the distance moved

the outcry of one deep-voiced hound.

Other voices joined that voice:

another place, a later time,

a hunter’s fire among the trees,

faces turned to the blaze, laughter

and then silence, while in the dark

around us lay long breaths of sleep.

4.

And then, one by one, he moved me

through all the fields of our lives,

preparations, plantings, harvests,

crews joking at the row ends,

the water jug passing like a kiss.

He spoke of our history passing through us,

the way our families’ generations

overlap, the great teaching

coming down by deed of companionship:

characters of fields and times and men,

qualities of devotion and of work—

endless fascinations, passions

old as mind, new as light.

All our years around us, near us,

I saw him furious and narrow,

like most men, and saw the virtue

that made him unlike most.

It was his passion to be true

to the condition of the Fall—

to live by the sweat of his face, to eat

his bread, assured that cost was paid.

5.

We came then to his time of pain,

when the early morning light showed,

as always, the sweet world, and all

an able, well-intentioned man

might do by dark, and his strength failed

before the light. His body had begun

too soon its earthward journey,

filling with gravity, and yet his mind

kept its old way.

Again, in the sun

of his last harvest, I heard him say:

“Do you want to take this row,

and let me get out of your way?”

I saw the world ahead of him then

for the first time, and I saw it

as he already had seen it,

himself gone from it. It was a sight

I could not see and not weep.

He reached and would have touched me

with his hand, though he could not.

6.

Finally, he brought me to a hill

overlooking the fields that once

belonged to him, that he once

belonged to. “Look,” he said again.

I knew he wanted me to see

the years of care that place wore,

for his story lay upon it, a bloom,

a blessing.

The time and place so near,

we almost were the men we watched.

Summer’s end sang in the light.

We spoke of death and obligation,

the brevity of things and men.

Words never moved so heavily

between us, or cost us more. We hushed.

And then that man who bore his death

in him, and knew it, quietly said:

“Well. It’s a fascinating world,

after all.”

His life so powerfully

stood there in presence of his place

and work and time, I could not

realize except with grief

that only his spirit now was with me.

In the very hour he died, I told him,

before I knew his death, the thought

of years to come had moved me

like a call. I thought of healing,

health, friendship going on,

the generations gathering, our good times

reaching one best time of all.

7.

My mind was overborne with questions

I could not speak. It seemed to me

we had returned now to the dark

valley where our journey began.

But a brightening intelligence

was on his face. Insight moved him

as he once was moved by daylight.

The best teachers teach more

than they know. By their deaths

they teach most. They lead us beyond

what we know, and what they knew.

Thus my teacher, my old friend,

stood smiling now before me, wholly

moved by what had moved him partly

in the world.

Again the host of the dead

encircled us, as in a dance.

And I was aware now of the unborn

moving among them. As they turned

I could see their bodies come to light

and fade again in the dark throng.

They moved as to a distant or a hovering

song I strained for, but could not hear.

“Our way is endless,” my teacher said.

“The Creator is divided in Creation

for the joys of recognition. We knew

that Spirit in each other once;

it brings us here. By its divisions

and returns, the world lives.

Both mind and earth are made

of what its light gives and uses up.

So joy contains, survives its cost.

The dead abide, as grief knows.

We are what we have lost.”

There is a song in the Creation;

it has always been the gift

of every gifted voice, though none

ever sang it. As he spoke

I heard that song. In its changes and returns

his life was passing into life.

That moment, earth and song and mind,

the living and the dead, were one.

8.

At last, completed in his rest,

as one who has worked and bathed, fed

and loved and slept, he let fall

the beloved earth that I had brought him.

He raised his hand, turned me to my way.

And I, inheritor of what I mourned,

went back toward the light of day.

RISING

for Kevin Flood

1.

Having danced until nearly

time to get up, I went on

in the harvest, half lame

with weariness. And he

took no notice, and made

no mention of my distress.

He went ahead, assuming

that I would follow. I followed,

dizzy, half blind, bitter

with sweat in the hot light.

He never turned his head,

a man well known by his back

in those fields in those days.

He led me through long rows

of misery, moving like a dancer

ahead of me, so elated

he was, and able, filled

with desire for the ground’s growth.

We came finally to the high

still heat of four o’clock,

a long time before sleep.

And then he stood by me

and looked at me as I worked,

just looked, so that my own head

uttered his judgment, even

his laughter. He only said:

“That social life don’t get

down the row, does it, boy?”

2.

I worked by will then, he

by desire. What was ordeal

for me, for him was order

and grace, ideal and real.

That was my awkward boyhood,

the time of his mastery.

He troubled me to become

what I had not thought to be.

3.

The boy must learn the man

whose life does not travel

along any road, toward

any other place,

but is a journey back and forth

in rows, and in the rounds

of years. His journey’s end

is no place of ease, but the farm

itself, the place day labor

starts from journeys in,

returns to: the fields

whose past and potency are one.

4.

And that is our story,

not of time, but the forever

returning events of light,

ancient knowledge seeking

its new minds. The man at dawn

in spring of the year,

going to the fields,

visionary of seed and desire,

is timeless as a star.

5.

Any man’s death could end the story:

his mourners, having accompanied him

to the grave through all he knew,

turn back, leaving him complete.

But this is not the story of a life.

It is the story of lives, knit together,

overlapping in succession, rising

again from grave after grave.

For those who depart from it, bearing it

in their minds, the grave is a beginning.

It has weighted the earth with sudden

new gravity, the enrichment of pain.

There is a grave, too, in each

survivor. By it, the dead one lives.

He enters us, a broken blade,

sharp, clear as a lens or a mirror.

And he comes into us helpless, tender

as the newborn enter the world. Great

is the burden of our care. We must be true

to ourselves. How else will he know us?

Like a wound, grief receives him.

Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep

as part of ourselves the severe gift.

By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligence of life.

Where the tree falls the forest rises.

There is nowhere to stand but in absence,

no life but in the fateful night.

6.

Ended, a story is history;

it is in time, with time

lost. But if a man’s life

continue in another man,

then the flesh will rhyme

its part in immortal song.

By absence, he comes again.

There is a kinship of the fields

that gives to the living the breath

of the dead. The earth

opened in the spring, opens

in all springs. Nameless,

ancient, many-lived, we reach

through ages with the seed.

II

DESOLATION

A gracious Spirit sings as it comes

and goes. It moves forever

among things. Earth and flesh, passing

into each other, sing together.

Turned against that song, we go

where no singing is or light

or need coupled with its yes,

but spite, despair, fear, and loneliness.

Unless the solitary will forbear,

time enters the flesh to sever

passion from all care,

annul the lineage of consequence.

Unless the solitary will forbear,

the blade enters the ground

to tear the world’s comfort

out, root and crown.

THE STRAIT

1.

The valley holds its shadow.

My loves lie round me in the dark.

Through the woods on the hilltop

I see one distant light, a star

that seems to sway and flicker

as the trees move. I see the flight

of men crossing and crossing

the blank curve of heaven. I hear

the branches clashing in the wind.

2.

I have come to the end

of what I have supposed,

following my thread of song.

Who knows where it is going?

I am well acquainted now

among the dead. Only the past

knows me. In solitude

who will teach me?

3.

The world’s one song is passing

in and out of deaths, as thrush notes

move in the shadows, nearer and nearer,

and then away, intent, in the hollows

of the woods. It does not attend

the dead, or what will die. It is light

though it goes in the dark. It goes

ahead, summoning. What hears follows.

4.

Sitting among the bluebells

in my sorrow, for lost time

and the never forgotten dead,

I saw a hummingbird stand

in air to drink from flowers.

It was a kiss he took and gave.

At his lightness and the ardor

of his throat, the song I live by

stirred my mind. I said:

“By sweetness alone it survives.”

THE LAW THAT MARRIES ALL THINGS

1.

The cloud is free only

to go with the wind.

The rain is free

only in falling.

The water is free only

in its gathering together,

in its downward courses,

in its rising into air.

2.

In law is rest

if you love the law,

if you enter, singing, into it

as water in its descent.

3.

Or song is truest law,

and you must enter singing;

it has no other entrance.

It is the great chorus

of parts. The only outlawry

is in division.

4.

Whatever is singing

is found, awaiting the return

of whatever is lost.

5.

Meet us in the air

over the water,

sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,

the redbird sings,

here here here here.

SETTING OUT

for Gurney Norman

Even love must pass through loneliness,

the husbandman become again

the Long Hunter, and set out

not to the familiar woods of home

but to the forest of the night,

the true wilderness, where renewal

is found, the lay of the ground

a premonition of the unknown.

Blowing leaf and flying wren

lead him on. He can no longer be at home,

he cannot return, unless he begin

the circle that first will carry him away.

SONG (1)

In ignorance of the source, our want

affirms abundance in these days.

Truth keeps us though we do not know it.

O Spirit, our desolation is your praise.

FROM THE DISTANCE

1.

We are others and the earth,

the living of the dead.

Remembering who we are,

we live in eternity;

any solitary act

is work of community.

2.

All times are one

if heart delight

in work, if hands

join the world right.

3.

The wheel of eternity is turning

in time, its rhymes, austere,

at long intervals returning,

sing in the mind, not in the ear.

4.

A man of faithful thought may feel

in light, among the beasts and fields,

the turning of the wheel.

5.

Fall of the year:

at evening a frail mist

rose, glowing in the rain.

The dead and unborn drew near

the fire. A song, not mine,

stuttered in the flame.

III

LETTER

1.

To search for what belongs where it is,

for what, scattered, might come together,

I leave you, my mold, my cup;

I flow from your bonds, a stream risen

over the hold of its stones.

2.

Turning always in my mind toward you,

your slopes, folds, gentle openings

on which I would rest my song

like an open hand, I know the trials of absence,

comely lives I must pass by, not to return,

beauties I will not know in satisfaction,

but in the sharp clarity of desire.

3.

In place with you, as I come and go

I pass the thread of my song again

and again through the web of my life

and the lives of the dead before me,

the old resounding in the new.

Now in the long curve of a journey

I spin a single stand, carried away

by what must bring me home.

RETURNING

I was walking in a dark valley

and above me the tops of the hills

had caught the morning light.

I heard the light singing as it went

among the grassblades and the leaves.

I waded upward through the shadow

until my head emerged,

my shoulders were mantled with the light,

and my whole body came up

out of the darkness, and stood

on the new shore of the day.

Where I had come was home,

for my own house stood white

where the dark river wore the earth.

The sheen of bounty was on the grass,

and the spring of the year had come.

TO TANYA AT CHRISTMAS

Forgive me, my delight,

that grief and loneliness

have kept me. Though I come

to you in darkness, you are

companion of the light

that rises on all I know.

In the long night of the year

and of the spirit, God’s birth

is met with simple noise.

Deaf and blind in division,

I reach, and do not find.

You show the gentler way:

We come to good by love;

our words must be made flesh.

And flesh must be made word

at last, our lives rise

in speech to our children’s tongues.

They will tell how we once stood

together here, two trees

whose lives in annual sheddings

made their way into this ground,

whose bodies turned to earth

and song. The song will tell

how old love sweetens the fields.

SONG (2)

My gentle hill, I rest

beside you in the dark

in a place warmed by my body,

where by ardor, grace, work,

and loss, I belong.

IV

THE RIVER BRIDGED AND FORGOT

Who can impair thee, mighty King

Bridged and forgot, the river

in unwearying descent

carries down the soil

of ravaged uplands, waste

and acid from the strip mines,

poisons of our false

prosperity. What mind

regains of clarity

mourns, the current a slow

cortege of everything

that we have given up,

the materials of Creation

wrecked, the strewed substance

of our trust and dignity.

But on still afternoons

of summer, the water’s face

recovers clouds, the shapes

of leaves. Maple, willow,

sycamore stand light

and easy in their weight,

their branching forms formed

on the water, and yellow

warbler, swallow, oriole

stroke their deft flight

through the river’s serene reflection

of the sky, as though, corrupted,

it shows the incorrupt.

Is this memory or promise?

And what is grief beside it?

What is anger beside it?

It is unfinished. It will not

be finished. And a man’s life

will be, although his work

will not, nor his desire

for clarity. Beside

this dark passage of water

I make my work, lifework

of many lives that has

no end, for it takes circles

of years, of birth and death

for pattern, eternal form

visible in mystery.

It takes for pattern the heavenly

and earthly song of which

it is a part, which holds it

from despair: the joined voices

of all things, all muteness

vocal in their harmony.

For that, though none can hear

or sing it all, though I

must by nature fail,

my work has turned away

the priced infinity

of mechanical desire.

This work that many loves

inspire teaches the mind

resemblance to the earth

in seasonal fashioning,

departures and returns

of song. The hands strive

against their gravity

for envisioned lights and forms,

fallings of harmony;

they strive, fail at their season’s

end. The seasonless river

lays hand and handiwork

upon the world, obedient

to a greater Mind, whole

past holding or beholding,

in whose flexing signature

all the dooms assemble

and become the lives of things.

THE GIFT OF GRAVITY

All that passes descends,

and ascends again unseen

into the light: the river

coming down from the sky

to hills, from hills to sea,

and carving as it moves,

to rise invisible,

gathered to light, to return

again. “The river’s injury

is its shape.” I’ve learned no more.

We are what we are given

and what is taken away;

blessed be the name

of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes

is a gift, the meaning always

carried out of sight

to renew our whereabouts,

always a starting place.

And every gift is perfect

in its beginning, for it

is “from above, and cometh down

from the Father of lights.”

Gravity is grace.

All that has come to us

has come as the river comes,

given in passing away.

And if our wickedness

destroys the watershed,

dissolves the beautiful field,

then I must grieve and learn

that I possess by loss

the earth I live upon

and stand in and am. The dark

and then the light will have it.

I am newborn of pain

to love the new-shaped shore

where young cottonwoods

take hold and thrive in the wound,

kingfishers already nesting

in a hole in the sheared bank.

“What is left is what is”—

have learned no more. The shore

turns green under the songs

of the fires of the world’s end,

and what is there to do?

Imagine what exists

so that it may shine

in thought light and day light,

lifted up in the mind.

The dark returns to light

in the kingfisher’s blue and white

richly laid together.

He falls into flight

from the broken ground,

with strident outcry gathers

air under his wings.

In work of love, the body

forgets its weight. And once

again with love and singing

in my mind, I come to what

must come to me, carried

as a dancer by a song.

This grace is gravity.

V

SONG (3)

I stood and heard the steps of the city

and dreamed a lighter stepping than I heard,

the tread of my people dancing in a ring.

I knew that circle broken, the steps awry,

stone and iron humming in the air.

But I thought even there, among the straying

steps, of the dance that circles life around,

its shadows moving on the ground, in rhyme

of flesh with flesh, time with time, our bliss,

the earthly song that heavenly is.

THE WHEEL

for Robert Penn Warren

At the first strokes of the fiddle bow

the dancers rise from their seats.

The dance begins to shape itself

in the crowd, as couples join,

and couples join couples, their movement

together lightening their feet.

They move in the ancient circle

of the dance. The dance and the song

call each other into being. Soon

they are one—rapt in a single

rapture, so that even the night

has its clarity, and time

is the wheel that brings it round.

In this rapture the dead return.

Sorrow is gone from them.

They are light. They step

into the steps of the living

and turn with them in the dance

in the sweet enclosure

of the song, and timeless

is the wheel that brings it round.

THE DANCE

I would have each couple turn,

join and unjoin, be lost

in the greater turning

of other couples, woven

in the circle of a dance,

the song of long time flowing

over them, so they may return,

turn again in to themselves

out of desire greater than their own,

belonging to all, to each,

to the dance, and to the song

that moves them through the night.

What is fidelity? To what

does it hold? The point

of departure, or the turning road

that is departure and absence

and the way home? What we are

and what we were once

are far estranged. For those

who would not change, time

is infidelity. But we are married

until death, and are betrothed

to change. By silence, so,

I learn my song. I earn

my sunny fields by absence, once

and to come. And I love you

as I love the dance that brings you

out of the multitude

in which you come and go.

Love changes, and in change is true.

PASSING THE STRAIT

1.

Forsaking all others, we

are true to all. What we love

here, we would not desecrate

anywhere. Seed or song, work

or sleep, no matter the need,

what we let fall, we keep.

2.

The dance passes beyond us,

our loves loving their loves,

and returns, having passed through

the breaths and sleeps of the world,

the woven circuits of desire,

which leaving here arrive here.

Love moves in a bright sphere.

3.

Past the strait of kept faith

the flesh rises, is joined

to light. Risen from distraction

and weariness, we come

into the turning and changing

circle of all lovers. On this height

our labor changes into flight.

OUR CHILDREN, COMING OF AGE

In the great circle, dancing in

and out of time, you move now

toward your partners, answering

the music suddenly audible to you

that only carried you before

and will carry you again.

When you meet the destined ones

now dancing toward you,

we will be in line behind you,

out of your awareness for the time,

we whom you know, others we remember

whom you do not remember, others

forgotten by us all.

When you meet, and hold love

in your arms, regardless of all,

the unknown will dance away from you

toward the horizon of light.

Our names will flutter

on these hills like little fires.

SONG (4)

for Guy Davenport

Within the circles of our lives

we dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasons

within the circles of the years,

the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons

within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go

changed, changing. Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,

grief and joy. The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes

we turn in pairs, that joining

joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,

out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

VI

IN RAIN

1.

I go in under foliage

light with rain-light

in the hill’s cleft,

and climb, my steps

silent as flight

on the wet leaves.

Where I go, stones

are wearing away

under the sky’s flow.

2.

The path I follow

I can hardly see

it is so faintly trod

and overgrown.

At times, looking,

I fail to find it

among dark trunks, leaves

living and dead. And then

I am alone, the woods

shapeless around me.

I look away, my gaze

at rest among leaves,

and then I see the path

again, a dark way going on

through the light.

3.

In a mist of light

falling with the rain

I walk this ground

of which dead men

and women I have loved

are part, as they

are part of me. In earth,

in blood, in mind,

the dead and living

into each other pass,

as the living pass

in and out of loves

as stepping to a song.

The way I go is

marriage to this place,

grace beyond chance,

love’s braided dance

covering the world.

4.

Marriages to marriages

are joined, husband and wife

are plighted to all

husbands and wives,

any life has all lives

for its delight.

Let the rain come,

the sun, and then the dark,

for I will rest

in any easy bed tonight.

ENTRIES

(1994)

PART ONE

Some Differences

In Memory: Harlan and Anna Hubbard

FOR THE EXPLAINERS

Spell the spiel of cause and effect,

Ride the long rail of fact after fact;

What curled the plume in the drake’s tail

And put the white ring around his neck?

A MARRIAGE SONG

In January cold, the year’s short light,

We make new marriage here;

The day is clear, the ground is bridal white,

Songless the brittled air

As we come through the snow to praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

In time’s short light, and less than light, we pray

That odds be thus made evens,

And earthly love in its uncertain way

Be reconciled with Heaven’s.

Before the early dark, we praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

Now let her honest, honored bridegroom come,

All other choice foregone,

To make his vows and claim and take her home,

Their two lives made in one.

He comes now through the snow to praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

All preparation past, and rightly glad,

She makes her pledge for good

Against all possibility of bad,

Begins her womanhood,

And as she walks the snow, we praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

Now, as her parents, we must stand aside,

For what we owed we’ve paid her

In far from perfect truth and love—this bride

Is more than we have made her,

And so we come in snow to praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

January 10, 1981

VOICES LATE AT NIGHT

Until I have appeased the itch

To be a millionaire,

Spare us, O Lord, relent and spare;

Don’t end the world till it has made me rich.

It ends in poverty.

O Lord, until I come to fame

I pray Thee, keep the peace;

Allay all strife, let rancor cease

Until my book may earn its due acclaim.

It ends in strife, unknown.

Since I have promised wealth to all,

Bless our economy;

Preserve our incivility

And greed until the votes are cast this fall.

Unknown, it ends in ruin.

Favor the world, Lord, with Thy love;

Spare us for what we’re not.

I fear Thy wrath, and Hell is hot;

Don't blow Thy trumpet until I improve.

Worlds blaze; the trumpet sounds.

O Lord, despite our right and wrong,

Let Thy daylight come down

Again on woods and field and town,

To be our daily bread and daily song.

It lives in bread and song.

THE RECORD

My old friend tell us how the country changed:

where the grist mill was on Cane Run,

now gone; where the peach orchard was,

gone too; where the Springport Road was, gone

beneath returning trees; how the creek ran three weeks

after a good rain, long ago, no more;

how when these hillsides first were plowed, the soil

was black and deep, no stones, and that was long ago;

where the wild turkeys roosted in the old days;

“You’d have to know this country mighty well

before I could tell you where.”

And my young friend says: “Have him speak this

into a recorder. It is precious. It should be saved.”

I know the panic of that wish to save

the vital knowledge of the old times, handed down,

for it is rising off the earth, fraying away

in the wind and the coming day.

As the machines come and the people go

the old names rise, chattering, and depart.

But knowledge of my own going into old time

tells me no. Because it must be saved,

do not tell it to a machine to save it.

That old man speaking you have heard

since your boyhood, since his prime, his voice

speaking out of lives long dead, their minds

speaking in his own, by winter fires, in fields and woods,

in barns while rain beat on the roofs

and wind shook the girders. Stay and listen

until he dies or you die, for death

is in this, and grief is in it. Live here

as one who knows these things. Stay, if you live;

listen and answer. Listen to the next one

like him, if there is to be one. Be

the next one like him, if you must;

stay and wait. Tell your children. Tell them

to tell their children. As you depart

toward the coming light, turn back

and speak, as the creek steps downward

over the rocks, saying the same changing thing

in the same place as it goes.

When the record is made, the unchanging

word carried to a safe place

in a time not here, the assemblage

of minds dead and living, the loved lineage

dispersed, silent, turned away, the dead

dead at last, it will be too late.

A PARTING

From many hard workdays in the fields,

many passages through the woods,

many mornings on the river, lifting

hooked lines out of the dark,

from many nightfalls, many dawns,

on the ridgetops and the creek road,

as upright as a tree, as freely standing,

Arthur Rowanberry comes in his old age

into the care of doctors, into the prison

of technical mercy, disease

and hectic skill making their way

into his body, hungry invaders fighting

for claims in that dark homeland,

strangers touching him, calling his name,

and so he lies down at last

in a bare room far from home.

And we who know him come

from the places he knew us in, and stand

by his bed, and speak. He smiles

and greets us from another time.

We stand around him like a grove,

a moment’s shelter, old neighborhood

remade in that alien place. But the time

we stand in is not his time.

He is off in the places of his life,

now only places in his mind,

doing what he did in them when they were

the world’s places, and he the world’s man:

cutting the winter wood, piling the brush,

fixing the fences, mending the roofs,

caring for the crops under the long sun,

loading up the wagon, heading home.

ONE OF US

Must another poor body, brought

to its rest at last, be made the occasion

of yet another sermon? Have we nothing

to say of the dead that is not

a dull mortal lesson to the living,

our praise of Heaven blunted

by this craven blaming of the earth?

We must go with the body to the dark

grave, and there at the edge turn back

together—it is all that we can do—remembering

her as she is now in our minds

forever: how she gathered the chicks

into her apron before the storm, and tossed

the turkey hen over the fence,

so that the little ones followed,

peeping, out of the tall grass, safe

from the lurking snake; how she was one

of us, here with us, who is now gone.

THIRTY MORE YEARS

When I was a young man,

grown up at last, how large

I seemed to myself! I was a tree,

tall already, and what I had not

yet reached, I would yet grow

to reach. Now, thirty more years

added on, I have reached much

I did not expect, in a direction

unexpected. I am growing downward,

smaller, one among the grasses.

THE WILD ROSE

Sometimes hidden from me

in daily custom and in trust,

so that I live by you unaware

as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,

a wild rose blooming at the edge

of thicket, grace and light

where yesterday was only shade,

and once more I am blessed, choosing

again what I chose before.

THE BLUE ROBE

How joyful to be together, alone

as when we first were joined

in our little house by the river

long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;

and now instead of two stories fumbling

to meet, we belong to one story

that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness

of mortals, who know themselves:

how joyful to feel the heart quake

at the sight of a grandmother,

old friend in the morning light,

beautiful in her blue robe!

THE VENUS OF BOTTICELLI

I knew her when I saw her

in the vision of Botticelli, riding

shoreward out of the waves,

and afterward she was in my mind

as she had been before, but changed,

so that if I saw her here, near

nightfall, striding off the gleam

of the Kentucky River as it darkened

behind her, the willows touching

her with little touches laid

on breast and arm and thigh, I

would rise as after a thousand

years, as out of the dark grave,

alight, shaken, to remember her.

IN A MOTEL PARKING LOT, THINKING OF DR. WILLIAMS

I

The poem is important, but

not more than the people

whose survival it serves,

one of the necessities, so they may

speak what is true, and have

the patience for beauty: the weighted

grainfield, the shady street,

the well-laid stone and the changing tree

whose branches spread above.

For want of songs and stories

they have dug away the soil,

paved over what is left,

set up their perfunctory walls

in tribute to no god,

for the love of no man or woman,

so that the good that was here

cannot be called back

except by long waiting, by great

sorrow remembered and to come,

by invoking the understones

of the world, and the vivid air.

II

The poem is important,

as the want of it

proves. It is the stewardship

of its own possibility,

the past remembering itself

in the presence of

the present, the power learned

and handed down to see

what is present

and what is not: the pavement

laid down and walked over

regardlessly—by exiles, here

only because they are passing.

Oh, remember the oaks that were

here, the leaves, purple and brown,

falling, the nuthatches walking

headfirst down the trunks,

crying “onc! onc!” in the brightness

as they are doing now

in the cemetery across the street

where the past and the dead

keep each other. To remember,

to hear and remember, is to stop

and walk on again

to a livelier, surer measure.

It is dangerous

to remember the past only

for its own sake, dangerous

to deliver a message

that you did not get.

TO MY MOTHER

I was your rebellious son,

do you remember? Sometimes

I wonder if you do remember,

so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been

I wonder sometimes if it did not

precede my wrong, and I erred,

safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,

or my bed at night, so that almost

I should forgive you, who perhaps

foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,

causing me to smile now, looking back,

to see how paltry was my worst,

compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,

is the vision of that Heaven of which

we have heard, where those who love

each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,

the light a music in the air,

and all is unentangled,

and all is undismayed.

PART TWO

ON A THEME OF CHAUCER

I never have denied

What faith and scripture tell,

That Heaven’s host is glad,

Or that there’s pain in Hell.

But what I haven’t tried

I'll not put up for sale.

No man has ever died

And lived to tell the tale.

THE REASSURER

A people in the throes of national prosperity, who

breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat

poisoned food,

who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons

that they breathe, drink, and eat,

such a people crave the further poison of official

reassurance. It is not logical,

but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore

their President who tells them that all is well,

all is better than ever.

The President reassures the farmer and his wife who

have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have

exhausted themselves to pay for it,

and have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for

the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the

prosperity of corporations;

he consoles the Navahos, who have been exiled from their

place of exile, because the poor land contained

something required for the national prosperity,

after all;

he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a

substance used in the normal course of national

prosperity to make red apples redder;

he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who

sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of

the floor of a mined-out stripmine;

from his smile they understand that the fortunate have

a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have

a right to their misfortunes, and that these are

equal rights.

The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man

who has seen God, and found Him a true American,

not overbearingly smart.

The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the

Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,

who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if

it came, would bring financial ruin;

he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory

and Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who

has been wakened in the night by a dream of the

calamity of peace.

LET US PLEDGE

Let us pledge allegiance to the flag

and to the national sacrifice areas

for which it stands, garbage dumps

and empty holes, sold out for a higher

spire on the rich church, the safety

of voyagers in golf carts, the better mood

of the stock market. Let us feast

today, though tomorrow we starve. Let us

gorge upon the body of the Lord, consuming

the earth for our greater joy in Heaven,

that fair Vacationland. Let us wander forever

in the labyrinths of our self-esteem.

Let us evolve forever toward the higher

consciousness of the machine.

The spool of our engine-driven fate

unwinds, our history now outspeeding

thought, and the heart is a beatable tool.

THE VACATION

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

A LOVER’S SONG

When I was young and lately wed

And every fissionable head

Of this super power or that

Prepared the ultimate combat,

Gambling against eternity

To earn a timely victory

And end all time to win a day,

“Tomorrow let it end,” I’d pray,

“If it must end, but not tonight.”

And they were wrong and I was right;

It’s love that keeps the world alive

Beyond hate’s genius to contrive.

ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANT HETEROSEXUAL MEN

Come, dear brothers,

let us cheerfully acknowledge

that we are the last hope of the world,

for we have no excuses,

nobody to blame but ourselves.

Who is going to sit at our feet

and listen while we bewail

our historical sufferings? Who

will ever believe that we also

have wept in the night

with repressed longing to become

our real selves? Who will

stand forth and proclaim

that we have virtues and talents

peculiar to our category? Nobody,

and that is good. For here we are

at last with our real selves

in the real world. Therefore,

let us quiet our hearts, my brothers,

and settle down for a change

to picking up after ourselves

and a few centuries of honest work.

AIR

This man, proud and young,

turns homeward in the dark

heaven, free of his burden

of death by fire, of life in fear

of death by fire, in the city

now burning far below.

This is a young man, proud;

he sways upon the tall stalk

of pride, alone, in control of the

explosion by which he lives, one

of the children we have taught

to be amused by horror.

This is a proud man, young

in the work of death. Ahead of him

wait those made rich by fire.

Behind him, another child

is burning; a divine man

is hanging from a tree.

THE MAD FARMER, FLYING THE FLAG OF ROUGH BRANCH, SECEDES FROM THE UNION

From the union of power and money,

from the union of power and secrecy,

from the union of government and science,

from the union of government and art,

from the union of science and money,

from the union of ambition and ignorance,

from the union of genius and war,

from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,

the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

There is only one of him, but he goes.

He returns to the small country he calls home,

his own nation small enough to walk across.

He goes shadowy into the local woods,

and brightly into the local meadows and croplands.

He goes to the care of neighbors,

he goes into the care of neighbors.

He goes to the potluck supper, a dish

from each house for the hunger of every house.

He goes into the quiet of early mornings

of days when he is not going anywhere.

Calling his neighbors together into the sanctity

of their lives separate and together

in the one life of their commonwealth and home,

in their own nation small enough for a story

or song to travel across in an hour, he cries:

Come all ye conservatives and liberals

who want to conserve the good things and be free,

come away from the merchants of big answers,

whose hands are metalled with power;

from the union of anywhere and everywhere

by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price

and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;

from the union of work and debt, work and despair;

from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.

From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,

secede into care for one another

and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

Come into the life of the body, the one body

granted to you in all the history of time.

Come into the body’s economy, its daily work,

and its replenishment at mealtimes and at night.

Come into the body’s thanksgiving, when it knows

and acknowledges itself a living soul.

Come into the dance of community, joined

in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal

love of women and men for one another

and of neighbors and friends for one another.

Always disappearing, always returning,

calling his neighbors to return, to think again

of the care of flocks and herds, of gardens

and fields, of woodlots and forests and the uncut groves,

calling them separately and together, calling and calling,

he goes forever toward the long restful evening

and the croak of the night heron over the river at dark.

PART THREE

DUALITY

So God created man in his

own image, in the image of God

created he him; male and female

created he them.

I

To love is to suffer—did I

know this when first

I asked you for your love?

I did not. And yet until

I knew, I could not know what

I asked, or gave. I gave

a suffering that I took: yours

and mine, mine when yours;

and yours I have feared most.

II

What can bring us past

this knowledge, so that you

will never wish our life

undone? For if ever you

wish it so, then I must wish

so too, and lovers yet unborn,

whom we are reaching toward

with love, will turn to this

page, and find it blank.

III

I have feared to be unknown

and to offend—I must speak,

then, against the dread

of speech. What if, hearing,

you have no reply, and mind’s

despair annul the body’s hope?

Life in time may justify

any conclusion, whenever

our will is to conclude.

IV

Look at me now. Now,

after all the years, look at me

who have no beauty apart

from what we two have made

and been. Look at me

with the look that anger

and pain have taught you,

the gaze in which nothing

is guarded, nothing withheld.

V

You look at me, you give

a light, which I bear and return,

and we are held, and all

our time is held, in this

touching look—this touch

that, pressed against the touch

returning in the dark,

is almost sight. We burn

and see by our own light.

VI

Eyes looking into eyes looking

into eyes, touches that see

in the dark, remember Paradise,

our true home. God’s image

recalls us to Itself. We move

with motion not our own,

light upon light, day and

night, sway as two trees

in the same wind sway.

VII

Let us come to no conclusion,

but let our bodies burn

in time’s timelessness. Heaven

and earth give us to this night

in which we tell each other of

a Kingdom yet to come, saying

its secret, its silent names.

We become fleshed words, one

another’s uttered joy.

VIII

Joined in our mortal time,

we come to the resurrection

of words; they rise up

in our mouths, set free

of taints, errors, and bad luck.

In their new clarities

the leaf brightens, the air

clears, the syllables of water are

clear in the dark air as stars.

IX

We come, unsighted, in the dark,

to the great feast of lovers

where nothing is withheld.

That we are there we know

by touch, by inner sight.

They all are here, who by

their giving take, by taking

give, who by their living

love, and by loving live.

THE THREE

A woman wholly given in love is held

by a dying man and an immortal one.

The man dying knows himself departing

from her, leaving her in the arms

of the man who will live, cherishing her,

given to him as she is forever.

TO HAYDEN CARRUTH

Dear Hayden, when I read your book I was aching

in head, back, heart, and mind, and aching

with your aches added to my own, and yet for joy

I read on without stopping, made eager

by your true mastery, wit, sorrow, and joy,

each made true by the others. My reading done,

I swear I am feeling better. Here in Port Royal

I take off my hat to you up there in Munnsville

in your great dignity of being necessary. I swear

it appears to me you’re one of the rare fellows

who may finally amount to something. What shall

I say? I greet you at the beginning of a great career?

No. I greet you at the beginning, for we are

either beginning or we are dead. And let us have

no careers, lest one day we be found dead in them.

I greet you at the beginning that you have made

authentically in your art, again and again.

NOGUCHI FOUNTAIN

Sits level,

fills silently,

overflows,

makes music.

SPRING

A shower like a little song

Overtook him going home,

Wet his shoulders, and went on.

IMAGINATION

A young man’s love is bitter love

For what he must forego,

For what he ignorantly would have,

Desires but does not know.

The years, the years will teach him joys

That are more bitter still;

What in his having he forgoes

He has imagined well.

FOR AN ABSENCE

When I cannot be with you

I will send my love (so much

is allowed to human lovers)

to watch over you in the dark—

a winged small presence

who never sleeps, however long

the night. Perhaps it cannot

protect or help, I do not know,

but it watches always, and so

you will sleep within my love

within the room within the dark.

And when, restless, you wake

and see the room palely lit

by that watching, you will think,

“It’s only dawn,” and go

quiet to sleep again.

THE STORM

We lay in our bed as in a tomb

awakened by thunder to the dark

in which our house was one with night,

and then light came as if the black

roof of the world had cracked open,

as if the night of all time had broken,

and out our window we glimpsed the world

birthwet and shining, as even

the sun at noon had never made it shine.

PART FOUR

When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst

whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old,

thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall

gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not

JOHN 21:18

IN EXTREMIS: POEMS ABOUT MY FATHER

I

I was at home alone. He came

to fight, as I had known he would.

The war in Vietnam was on;

I’d spoken out, opposing it—

and so, I thought, embarrassed him.

Not because he loved the war.

He feared for me, or for himself

in me. Fear angered him. He was

my enemy; his mind was made

up like a fist. He sat erect

on the chair’s edge as on a horse,

would not take off his coat.

That was his way. My house was not

a house in which he would consent

to make himself at home that day.

The argument was hard and hot.

Tempered alike, we each knew where

the other’s hide was tenderest.

We went past reason and past sense

by way of any eloquence

that hurt. He leaned. I saw the brown

spot in the blue of his right eye.

Forefinger hooking through the air,

he said I had been led astray,

beguiled, by he knew who, by God!

And was I then to be his boy

forever? Or his equal? Or

his foe? His equal and his foe?

By grace (I think it must have been

by grace) I told him what I knew:

“Do you know who has been, by God,

the truest teacher in my life

from the beginning until now?”

“Who, by God?”

“You, by God!”

He wept and said, “By God, I’m proud.”

II

He was, in his strength, the most feeling

and the most demanding man

I have ever known. I knew at first

only the difficulty of his demand,

but now I know the fear in it.

He has been afraid always of the loss

of precious things. We live in time

as in hard rain, and have no shelter,

half hopeless in anxiety for the young,

half hopeless in compassion for the old.

The generations fail and we forget

what we were, and are. The earth,

even, is flowing away. And where

is the stay against indifference?

I know his fear now by my own.

Precious things are being lost.

III

My grandfather, in the lost tongue

of his kind and time, called drawers

“draws.” My father pronounced the word

that way himself from time to time

in commemoration. And now another

time had come. I diapered him

like a child and helped him go

with short slow steps to bed. Meaning

to invoke his old remembrance

to cheer him, I said, “Don’t lose

your draws.” “We miss him, don’t we?”

he said. “Yes,” I said. “Yes,” he said.

IV

Sometimes we do not know what time he’s in

Or if he is in time. The dead live in his mind.

They wait beyond his sight, made radiant by his long

Unchanging love, as by the mercy and the grace

Of God. At night I help him to lie down upon

That verge we reach by generation and by day.

He says that, though we sleep, we love eternally.

V

He dreamed there was a storm

And all was overturned.

In his great need he called

His mother and his father

To help him, and one he’d known

But did not know found him

On the dark stair, led him

Back to his bed. Next day,

The dream still near, he said,

In longing of this world

That in the next is joy,

“If I could have found Papa,

I’d have been so comforted.”

VI

I imagine him as he must appear

to his father and mother now,

if from the world of the dead they see

him as he now is—an old man

sliding his feet along the floor

in little childish steps. I imagine

that they call him “child,” and pity

him, and love him as they did,

for they are senior to him still,

having gone through the dark door,

and learned the hard things and the good

that only the dead can know.

And I imagine that they know also

the greater good, that we long for

but cannot know, that knows

of all our sorrow, and rejoices still.

VII

Sometimes in sleeping he forgets

That he is old and, waking up,

Intends to go out in the world

To work, just as he did before—

Only to find that his body now

No longer answers to his will,

And his mind too is changed but not

By him. And then he rages in

His grief, and will not be consoled.

He cannot be consoled by us,

More mortal in our fewer years,

Who have not reached the limit he

Has come to, when immortal love

In flesh, denying time, will look

At what is lost, and grief fulfill

The budget of desire. Sometimes,

At home, he longs to be at home.

VIII

And sometimes he fulfills

What must have been the worst

Of all his fears: to be

An old man, fierce and foul,

Outraged and unforgiving,

One man alone, mere fact

Beyond the reach of love.

For fear this is his fate,

And mine if it is his,

I struggle with him. Thus

We ardently debate

The truth of fantasy

Empowered by wrath—the facts

He says are lies, the lies

He says are facts—his

Eyes in their conviction hard

To meet, hard to avoid.

We go into a place

Of ruin, where light obscures,

To the right place for us now

In our mad argument,

Exchanging foolish fire

In reasoned eloquence,

And winning no success.

We still are as we were,

And yet we do not fail,

For thus estranged we both

Oppose his loneliness.

IX

The dead come near him in his sleep

And, waking, he calls out to them

To help him in his helplessness.

And though they in their distance keep

Silent, and give no help to him.

And do not answer his distress,

I hear him calling in my sleep

Among the living in the dim

House, where he calls in loneliness.

I go to help him in the deep

Night, waked and walking in whose time?

I am the brother called in darkness.

X

We watch the TV show,

Smooth faces and smooth talk

Made for everywhere,

Thus alien everywhere.

In deference to old age

And time, we sit down for

What no one can stand up for.

I wish him out of it,

That man-made other world.

I wish undone his absence

In body and in thought

From open countryside,

Our local air and light.

To honor him aright

I call him back to mind,

Remember him again

When he was my age now,

And straighter-backed than I,

Still hungry for the world.

His mind was then an act

Accomplished soon as thought,

Though now his body serves

Unwillingly at best

His mind’s unresting will.

I summon him away

From time and heaviness.

I see him as he was.

XI

The light is low and red upon the fields,

The mists are rising in the long hollow,

The shadows have stretched out, and he comes walking

In deep bluegrass that silences his steps.

Elated and upright, he walks beneath

The walnut trees around the spring. His work

Is done, the office shut and still, his chair

Empty. And now at his long shadow’s foot,

He comes to salt the ewe flock, and to hear

The meadowlarks sing in the evening quiet.

He calls his sheep, who know his voice and come,

Crowding up to him as the light departs

And earth’s great shadow gathers them in. White

In darkening air, their fleeces glow as he

Puts down the salt, a handful at a place,

Along the path. At last, the bucket empty,

He stands, watching the sheep, the deepening sky,

The few small stars already pointing out.

Now may he come to that good rest again.

XII

What did I learn from him?

He taught the difference

Between good work and sham,

Between nonsense and sense.

He taught me sentences,

Outspoken fact for fact,

In swift coherences

Discriminate and exact.

He served with mind and hand

What we were hoping for:

The small house on the land,

The shade tree by the door,

Garden, smokehouse, and cellar,

Granary, crib, and loft

Abounding, and no year

Lived at the next year’s cost.

He kept in mind, alive,

The idea of the dead:

“A steer should graze and thrive

Wherever he lowers his head.”

He said his father’s saying.

We were standing on the hill

To watch the cattle grazing

As the gray evening fell.

“Look. See that this is good,

And then you won’t forget.”

I saw it as he said,

And I have not forgot.

EPITAPH

Having lived long in time,

he lives now in timelessness

without sorrow, made perfect

by our never finished love,

by our compassion and forgiveness,

and by his happiness in receiving

these gifts we give. Here in time

we are added to one another forever.

COME FORTH

I dreamed of my father when he was old.

We went to see some horses in a field;

they were sorrels, as red almost as blood,

the light gold on their shoulders and haunches.

Though they came to us, all a-tremble

with curiosity and snorty with caution,

they had never known bridle or harness.

My father walked among them, admiring,

for he was a knower of horses, and these were fine.

He leaned on a cane and dragged his feet

along the ground in hurried little steps

so that I called to him to take care, take care,

as the horses stamped and frolicked around him.

But while I warned, he seized the mane

of the nearest one. “It’ll be all right,”

he said, and then from his broken stance

he leapt astride, and sat lithe and straight

and strong in the sun’s unshadowed excellence.

GIVEN

(2005)

In Memory: Ross Feld

PART ONE

In a Country Once Forested

DUST

The dust motes float

and swerve in the sunbeam,

as lively as worlds,

and I remember my brother

when we were boys:

“We may be living on an atom

in somebody’s wallpaper.”

IN A COUNTRY ONCE FORESTED

The young woodland remembers

the old, a dreamer dreaming

of an old holy book,

an old set of instructions,

and the soil under the grass

is dreaming of a young forest,

and under the pavement the soil

is dreaming of grass.

TO TANYA ON MY SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

What wonder have you done to me?

In binding love you set me free.

These sixty years the wonder prove:

I bring you aged a young man’s love.

THEY

I see you down there, white-haired

among the green leaves,

picking the ripe raspberries,

and I think, “Forty-two years!”

We are the you and I who were

they whom we remember.

CATHEDRAL

Stone

of the earth

made

of its own weight

light

DANTE

If you imagine

others are there,

you are there yourself.

THE MILLENNIUM

What year

does the phoebe

think it is?

JUNE WIND

Light and wind are running

over the headed grass

as though the hill had

melted and now flowed.

WHY

Why all the embarrassment

about being happy?

Sometimes I’m as happy

as a sleeping dog,

and for the same reasons,

and for others.

THE REJECTED HUSBAND

After the storm and the new

stillness of the snow, he returns

to the graveyard, as though

he might lift the white coverlet,

slip in beside her as he used to do,

and again feel, beneath his hand,

her flesh quicken and turn warm.

But he is not her husband now.

To participate in resurrection, one

first must be dead. And he goes

back into the whitened world, alive.

THE INLET

In a dream I go

out into the sunlit street

and I see a boy walking

clear-eyed in the light.

I recognize him, he is

Bill Lippert, wearing the gray

uniform of the school

we attended many years ago.

And then I see that my brother

is with me in the dream,

dressed too in the old uniform.

Our friend looks as he did

when we first knew him,

and until I wake I believe

I will die of grief, for I know

that this boy grew into a man

who was a faithful friend

who died.

Where I stood,

seeing and knowing, was time,

where we die of grief. And surely

the bright street of my dream,

in which we saw again

our old friend as a boy

clear-eyed in innocence of his death,

was some quickly-crossed

small inlet of eternity.

LISTEN!

How fine to have a radio

and beautiful music playing

while I sit at rest in the evening.

How fine to hear through the music

the cries of wild geese on the river.

IN ART ROWANBERRY’S BARN

In Art Rowanberry’s barn, when Art’s death

had become quietly a fact among

the other facts, Andy Catlett found

a jacket made of the top half

of a pair of coveralls after

the legs wore out, for Art

never wasted anything.

Andy found a careful box made

of woodscraps with a strap

for a handle; it contained

a handful of small nails

wrapped in a piece of newspaper,

several large nails, several

rusty bolts with nuts and washers,

some old harness buckles

and rings, rusty but usable,

several small metal boxes, empty,

and three hickory nuts

hollowed out by mice.

And all of these things Andy

put back where they had been,

for time and the world and other people

to dispense with as they might,

but not by him to be disprized.

This long putting away

of things maybe useful was not all

of Art’s care-taking; he cared

for creatures also, every day

leaving his tracks in dust, mud,

or snow as he went about

looking after his stock, or gave

strength to lighten a neighbor’s work.

Andy found a bridle made

of several lengths of baling twine

knotted to a rusty bit,

an old set of chain harness,

four horseshoes of different sizes,

and three hammerstones picked up

from the opened furrow on days

now as perfectly forgotten

as the days when they were lost.

He found a good farrier’s knife,

an awl, a key to a lock

that would no longer open.

BURLEY COULTER’S SONG FOR KATE HELEN BRANCH

The rugs were rolled back to the wall,

The band in place, the lamps all lit.

We talked and laughed a little bit

And then obeyed the caller’s call—

Light-footed, happy, half entranced—

To balance, swing, and promenade.

Do you remember how we danced

And how the fiddler played?

About midnight we left the crowd

And wandered out to take a stroll.

We heard the treefrogs and the owl;

Nearby the creek was running loud.

The good dark held us as we chanced

The joy we two together made,

Remembering how we’d whirled and pranced

And how the fiddler played.

That night is many years ago

And gone, and still I see you clear,

Clear as the lamplight in your hair.

The old time comes around me now,

And I remember how you glanced

At me, and how we stepped and swayed.

I can’t forget the way we danced,

The way the fiddler played.

HOW TO BE A POET

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration,

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity. Any readers

who like your work,

doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensioned life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

WORDS

1.

What is one to make of a life given

to putting things into words,

saying them, writing them down?

Is there a world beyond words?

There is. But don’t start, don’t

go on about the tree unqualified,

standing in light that shines

to time’s end beyond its summoning

name. Don’t praise the speechless

starlight, the unspeakable dawn.

Just stop.

2.

Well, we can stop

for a while, if we try hard enough,

if we are lucky. We can sit still,

keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore,

the river, the stone call themselves

by whatever they call themselves, their own

sounds, their own silence, and thus

may know for a moment the nearness

of the world, its vastness,

its vast variousness, far and near,

which only silence knows. And then

we must call all things by name

out of the silence again to be with us,

or die of namelessness.

TO A WRITER OF REPUTATION

. . . the man must remain obscure.

CÉZANNE

Having begun in public anonymity,

you did not count on this

literary sublimation by which

some body becomes a “name”—

as if you have died and have become

a part of mere geography. Greet,

therefore, the roadsigns on the road.

Or perhaps you have become deaf and blind,

or merely inanimate, and may

be studied without embarrassment

by the disinterested, the dispassionate,

and the merely curious,

not fearing to be overheard.

Hello to the grass, then, and to the trees.

Or perhaps you are secretly

still alert and moving, no longer the one

they have named, but another,

named by yourself,

carrying away this morning’s showers

for your private delectation.

Hello, river.

PART TWO

Further Words

SEVENTY YEARS

Well, anyhow, I am

not going to die young.

A PASSING THOUGHT

I think therefore

I think I am.

THE LEADER

Head like a big

watermelon,

frequently thumped

and still not ripe.

THE ONGOING HOLY WAR AGAINST EVIL

Stop the killing, or

I’ll kill you, you

God-damned murderer!

SOME FURTHER WORDS

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.

I am an old-fashioned man. I like

the world of nature despite its mortal

dangers. I like the domestic world

of humans, so long as it pays its debts

to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.

I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose

is a language that can pay just thanks

and honor for those gifts, a tongue

set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places

is an “environment.” And a house

for sale is not a “home.” Economics

is not “science,” nor “information” knowledge.

A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool

in a public office is not a “leader.”

A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost

of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,

returns in the night to say again:

“Let me tell you something, boy.

An intellectual whore is a whore.”

The world is babbled to pieces after

the divorce of things from their names.

Ceaseless preparation for war

is not peace. Health is not procured

by sale of medication, or purity

by the addition of poison. Science

at the bidding of the corporations

is knowledge reduced to merchandise;

it is a whoredom of the mind,

and so is the art that calls this “progress.”

So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”

I think the issues of “identity” mostly

are poppycock. We are what we have done,

which includes our promises, includes

our hopes, but promises first. I know

a “fetus” is a human child.

I loved my children from the time

they were conceived, having loved

their mother, who loved them

from the time they were conceived

and before. Who are we to say

the world did not begin in love?

I would like to die in love as I was born,

and as myself, of life impoverished, go

into the love all flesh begins

and ends in. I don’t like machines,

which are neither mortal nor immortal,

though I am constrained to use them.

(Thus the age perfects its clench.)

Some day they will be gone, and that

will be a glad and a holy day.

I mean the dire machines that run

by burning the world’s body and

its breath. When I see an airplane

fuming through the once-pure sky

or a vehicle of the outer space

with its little inner space

imitating a star at night, I say,

“Get out of there!” as I would speak

to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.

When I hear the stock market has fallen,

I say, “Long live gravity! Long live

stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces

of fantasy capitalism!” I think

an economy should be based on thrift,

on taking care of things, not on theft,

usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,

though mortal, ignorant, and small.

The world is whole beyond human knowing.

The body’s life is its own, untouched

by the little clockwork of explanation.

I approve of death, when it comes in time

to the old. I don’t want to live

on mortal terms forever, or survive

an hour as a cooling stew of pieces

of other people. I don’t believe that life

or knowledge can be given by machines.

The machine economy has set afire

the household of the human soul,

and all the creatures are burning within it.

“Intellectual property” names

the deed by which the mind is bought

and sold, the world enslaved. We

who do not own ourselves, being free,

own by theft what belongs to God,

to the living world, and equally

to us all. Or how can we own a part

of what we only can possess entirely?

“The laborer is worthy of his hire,”

but he cannot own what he knows,

which must be freely told, or labor

dies with the laborer. The farmer

is worthy of the harvest made

in time, but he must leave the light

by which he planted, grew, and reaped,

the seed immortal in mortality,

freely to the time to come. The land

too he keeps by giving it up,

as the thinker receives and gives a thought,

as the singer sings in the common air.

I don’t believe that “scientific genius”

in its naïve assertions of power

is equal either to nature or

to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions

of the nuclei of atoms and cells

and this world’s every habitation

have not brought us to the light

but sent us wandering farther through

the dark. Nor do I believe

“artistic genius” is the possession

of any artist. No one has made

the art by which one makes the works

of art. Each one who speaks speaks

as a convocation. We live as councils

of ghosts. It is not “human genius”

that makes us human, but an old love,

an old intelligence of the heart

we gather to us from the world,

from the creatures, from the angels

of inspiration, from the dead—

an intelligence merely nonexistent

to those who do not have it, but

to those who have it more dear than life.

And just as tenderly to be known

are the affections that make a woman and a man,

their household, and their homeland one.

These too, though known, cannot be told

to those who do not know them, and fewer

of us learn them, year by year,

loves that are leaving the world

like the colors of extinct birds,

like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals,

every one truly what it is:

gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made

of light and luminous within itself.

They know (better than we do) how

to live in the places where they live.

And so I would like to be a true

human being, dear reader—a choice

not altogether possible now.

But this is what I’m for, the side

I’m on. And this is what you should

expect of me, as I expect it of myself,

though for realization we may wait

a thousand or a million years.

LYSIMACHIA NUMMULARIA

It is called moneywort

for its “coinlike” leaves

and perhaps its golden flowers.

I love it because it is

a naturalized exotic

that does no harm,

and for its lowly thriving,

and for its actual

unlikeness to money.

LEAVINGS

(2010)

I dedicate this book

with respect

to the poet John Haines

LIKE SNOW

Suppose we did our work

like the snow, quietly, quietly,

leaving nothing out.

ON THE THEORY OF THE BIG BANG AS THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE

I.

What banged?

II.

Before banging

how did it get there?

III.

When it got there

where was it?

LOOK IT OVER

I leave behind even

my walking stick. My knife

is in my pocket, but that

I have forgot. I bring

no car, no cell phone,

no computer, no camera,

no CD player, no fax, no

TV, not even a book. I go

into the woods. I sit on

a log provided at no cost.

It is the earth I’ve come to,

the earth itself, sadly

abused by the stupidity

only humans are capable of

but, as ever, itself. Free.

A bargain! Get it while it lasts.

A LETTER

(to Ed McClanahan)

Dear Ed,

I dreamed that you and I were sent to Hell.

The place we went to was not fiery

or cold, was not Dante’s Hell or Milton’s,

but was, even so, as true a Hell as any.

It was a place unalterably public

in which crowds of people were rushing

in weary frenzy this way and that,

as when classes change in a university

or at quitting time in a city street,

except that this place was wider far

than we could see, and the crowd as large

as the place. In that crowd every one

was alone. Every one was hurrying.

Nobody was sitting down. Nobody

was standing around. All were rushing

so uniformly in every direction, so

uniformly frantic, that to average them

would have stood them still. It was a place

deeply disturbed. We thought, you and I,

that we might get across and come out

on the other side, if we stayed together,

only if we stayed together. The other side

would be a clear day in a place we would know.

We joined hands and hurried along,

snatching each other through small openings

in the throng. But the place was full

of dire distractions, dire satisfactions.

We were torn apart, and I found you

breakfasting upon a huge fried egg.

I snatched you away: “Ed! Come on!”

And then, still susceptible, I met

a lady whose luster no hell could dim.

She took all my thought. But then,

in the midst of my delight, my fear

returned: “Oh! Damn it all! Where’s Ed?”

I fled, searching, and found you again.

We went on together. How this ended

I do not know. I woke before it could end.

But, old friend, I want to tell you

how fine it was, what a durable

nucleus of joy it gave my fright

to force that horrid way with you, how

heavenly, let us say, in spite of Hell.

P.S.

Do you want to know why

you were distracted by an egg, and I

by a beautiful lady? That’s Hell.

A LETTER

(to my brother)

Dear John,

You said, “Treat your worst enemies

as if they could become your best friends.”

You were not the first to perpetrate

such an outrage, but you were right.

Try as we might, we cannot

unspring that trap. We can either

befriend our enemies or we can die

with them, in the absolute triumph

of the absolute horror constructed

by us to save us from them.

Tough, but “All right,” our Mary said,

“we’ll be nice to the sons of bitches.”

A LETTER

(to Hayden Carruth)

Dear Hayden,

How good—how liberating!—to read

of your hatred of Alice in Wonderland.

I used to hear my mother reading it

to my sisters, and I hated it too,

but have always been embarrassed

to say so, believing that everybody else

loved it. But who the hell wants to go

down a rabbit hole? I like my feet best

when they’re walking on top of the ground.

If I could burrow like a mole, I would,

and I would like that. I would like

to fly like a bird, if I could. Otherwise,

my stratum of choice is the surface.

I prefer skin to anatomy, green grass

to buried rocks, terra firma to the view

from anywhere higher than a tree.

“Long live superficiality!” say I,

as one foot fares waywardly graveward.

A LETTER

(to Ernest J. Gaines)

Dear Ernie,

I’ve known you since we were scarcely

more than boys, sitting as guests

at Wallace Stegner’s table, and I have read

everything you have written since then

because I think what you have written

is beautiful and quietly, steadily

brave, in the manner of the best bravery.

I feel in a way closer to your work

than to that of anybody else of our age.

And why is that? I think it’s because

we both knew the talk of old people,

old country people, in summer evenings.

Having worked hard all their lives long

and all the long day, they came out

on the gallery down in your country,

out on the porch or doorstep in mine,

where they would sit at ease in the cool

of evening, and they would talk quietly

of what they had known, of what

they knew. In their rest and quiet talk

there was peace that was almost heavenly,

peace never to be forgotten, never

again quite to be imagined, but peace

above all else that we have longed for.

GIVE IT TIME

The river is of the earth

and it is free. It is rigorously

embanked and bound,

and yet is free. “To hell

with restraint,” it says.

“I have got to be going.”

It will grind out its dams.

It will go over or around them.

They will become pieces.

QUESTIONNAIRE

1. How much poison are you willing

to eat for the success of the free

market and global trade? Please

name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much

evil are you willing to do?

Fill in the following blanks

with the names of your favorite

evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared

to make for culture and civilization?

Please list the monuments, shrines,

and works of art you would

most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and

the flag, how much of our beloved

land are you willing to desecrate?

List in the following spaces

the mountains, rivers, towns, farms

you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,

the energy sources, the kinds of security,

for which you would kill a child.

Name, please, the children whom

you would be willing to kill.

AND I BEG YOUR PARDON

The first mosquito:

come here, and I will kill thee,

holy though thou art.

DAVID JONES

As the soldier takes bodily form

(or dissolves) within the rubble and wreck

of war, so the holy Virgin takes

shape within the world of creatures,

and the angel, to come to her at all,

must wear a caul of birds,

his robe folded like the hills.

TU FU

As I sit here

in my little boat

tied to the shore

of the passing river

in a time of ruin,

I think of you,

old ancestor,

and wish you well.

A SPEECH TO THE GARDEN CLUB OF AMERICA

With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;

There are so many outcomes that are worse.

But I must add I’m sorry for getting here

By a sustained explosion through the air,

Burning the world in fact to rise much higher

Than we should go. The world may end in fire

As prophesied—our world! We speak of it

As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit

Of temporary progress, digging up

An antique dark-held luster to corrupt

The present light with smokes and smudges, poison

To outlast time and shatter comprehension.

Burning the world to live in it is wrong,

As wrong as to make war to get along

And be at peace, to falsify the land

By sciences of greed, or by demand

For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify

The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.

But why not play it cool? Why not survive

By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?

Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than the summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

WHILE ATTENDING THE ANNUAL

CONVOCATION OF CAUSE THEORISTS

AND BIGBANGISTS AT THE LOCAL PROVINCIAL

RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, THE MAD FARMER

INTERCEDES FROM THE BACK ROW

“Chance” is a poor word among

the mazes of causes and effects, the last

stand of these all-explainers who,

backed up to the first and final Why,

reply, “By chance, of course!” As if

that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.

In the beginning something by chance

existed that would bang and by chance

it banged, obedient to the by-chance

previously existing laws of existence

and banging, from which the rest proceeds

by the logic of cause and effect also

previously existing by chance? Well,

when all that happened who was there?

Did the chance that made the bang then make

the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?

Prove to me that chance did ever

make a sycamore tree, a yellow-

throated warbler nesting and singing

high up among the white limbs

and the golden leaf-light, and a man

to love the tree, the bird, the song

his life long, and by his love to save

them, so far, from all machines.

By chance? Prove it, then, and I

by chance will kiss your ass.

MEN UNTRAINED TO COMFORT

Jason Needly found his father, old Ab, at work

at the age of eighty in the topmost

tier of the barn. “Come down!” Jason called.

“You got no business up there at your age.”

And his father descended, not by a ladder,

there being none, but by inserting his fingers

into the cracks between boards and climbing

down the wall.

And when he was young

and some account and strong and knew

nothing of weariness, old man Milt Wright,

back in the days they called him “Steady,”

carried the rastus plow on his shoulder

up the high hill to his tobacco patch, so

when they got there his mule would be fresh,

unsweated, and ready to go.

Early Rowanberry,

for another, bought a steel-beam breaking plow

at the store in Port William and shouldered it

before the hardly-believing watchers, and carried it

the mile and a half home, down through the woods

along Sand Ripple.

“But the tiredest my daddy

ever got,” his son, Art, told me one day,

“was when he carried fifty rabbits and a big possum

in a sack on his back up onto the point yonder

and out the ridge to town to sell them at the store.”

“But why,” I asked, “didn’t he hitch a team

to the wagon and haul them up there by the road?”

“Well,” Art said, “we didn’t have but two

horses in them days, and we spared them

every way we could. A many a time I’ve seen

my daddy or grandpa jump off the wagon or sled

and take the end of a singletree beside a horse.”

OVER THE EDGE

To tell a girl you loved her—my God!—

that was a leap off a cliff, requiring little

sense, sweet as it was. And I have loved

many girls, women too, who by various fancies

of my mind have seemed loveable. But only

with you have I actually tried it: the long labor,

the selfishness, the self-denial, the children

and grandchildren, the garden rows planted

and gathered, the births and deaths of many years.

We boys, when we were young and romantic

and ignorant, new to the mystery and the power,

would wonder late into the night on the cliff’s edge:

Was this love real? Was it true? And how

would you know? Well, it was time would tell,

if you were patient and could spare the time,

a long time, a lot of trouble, a lot of joy.

This one begins to look—would you say?—real?

Index of Titles and First Lines

(Titles are in roman, first lines in italics)

A gracious Spirit sings as it comes 281

A high wooded hill near Florence, an April 77

A man could be a god 251

A people in the throes of national prosperity, who 321

A shower like a little song 332

A sparrow is 20

A spring wind blowing 59

A woman wholly given in love is held 331

A young man’s love is bitter love, 332

Above trees and rooftops 240

Adze, The 231

After the storm and the new 348

After we saw the wild ducks 230

Against the War in Vietnam 75

Air 325

Air and Fire 131

All day our eyes could find no resting place. 3

All goes back to the earth, 78

All that I serve will die, all my delights, 130

All that passes descends, 295

Always, on their generations breaking wave, 159

Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found 132

And I Beg Your Pardon 376

Anger Against Beasts 182

Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men 324

Anniversary, An 197

Another Descent 239

April Woods: Morning 68

Architecture, An 19

Aristocracy, The 17

Arrival, The 175

As I sit here 376

As I started home after dark 121

As my first blow against it, I would not stay. 142

As spring begins the river rises, 123

As the soldier takes bodily form 376

At a Country Funeral 183

At my age my father 188

At start of spring I open a trench 233

At the end of October 64

At the first strokes of the fiddle bow 298

Autumn Burning, An 247

Awake at Night 147

Before Dark 71

Being, whose flesh dissolves 161

Believe the automatic righteousness 75

Below 240

Better born than married, misled, 156

Between painting a roof yesterday and the hay 132

Between the living world 232

Beyond this final house 9

Bird Killer, The 18

Birth of color 68

Birth, The 143

Blue Robe, The 315

Boone 9

Breaking 166

Bridged and forgot, the river 292

Broken Ground, The 29

Burley Coulter’s Song For Kate Helen Branch 353

By the fall of years I learn how it has been 217

Canticle 19

Cathedral 346

“Chance” is a poor word among 379

Clear Days, The 193

Clearing, The 209

Clumsy at first, fitting together 171

Cold Pane, The 232

Cold, The 65

Come Forth 342

Come, dear brothers, 324

Companions, The 16

Contrariness of the Mad Farmer, The 139

Country of Marriage, The 167

Creation Myth 249

Current, The 136

Dance, A 234

Dance, The 299

Dante 347

Dark with Power 76

Dark with power, we remain 76

David Jones 376

Dear Ed, 369

Dear Ernie, 373

Dear Hayden, 372

Dear Hayden, when I read your book I was aching 331

Dear John, 371

Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath 190

Deep in the back ways of my mind I see them 61

Design of the House: Ideal and Hard Time, The 33

Desolation 281

Did I believe I had a clear mind? 166

Discipline, A 110

Do Not Be Ashamed 82

Do not think me gentle 248

Don’t think of it. 187

Dream, The 72

Duality 328

Dust 345

Earth and Fire 141

Elegy 3

Enriching the Earth 125

Envoy 111

Epitaph 341

Even in a country you know by heart 252

Even love must pass through loneliness, 286

Except 251

Except in idea, perfection is as wild 33

Fall 247

Falling Asleep 232

Familiar, The 118

Farmer Among the Tombs, The 118

Farmer and the Sea, The 140

Farmer, Speaking of Monuments, The 159

Fear of Darkness, The 25

Fear of Love, The 234

February 2, 1968 122

Finches, The 69

First, The 250

Flying at night, above the clouds, all earthmarks spurned, 240

For an Absence 333

For parents, the only way 244

For the Explainers 307

For the Future 252

For the Hog Killing 230

For the Rebuilding of a House 119

For whatever is let go 24

Forgive me, my delight, 290

Forsaking all others, we 300

Forty Years 238

From many hard workdays in the fields, 312

From my wife and my households and fields 131

From the Crest 220

From the Distance 287

From the porch at dusk I watched 71

From the union of power and money, 326

Gathering, The 188

Gift of Gravity, The 295

Give It Time 374

Goods 231

Grace 79

Grandmother, The 156

Green and White 12

Grief 246

Growing weather; enough rain; 151

Guest, The 27

Handing Down, The 40

Having begun in public anonymity 356

Having danced until nearly 277

Having lived long in time, 341

Having once put his hand into the ground, 136

He comes along the street, singing 22

Head like a big 358

Her fate seizes her and brings her 170

Her First Calf 170

Heron, The 157

Hidden Singer, The 241

His enemy, the universe, surrounds him nightly with stars 18

His memories lived in the place 129

History 201

Homecoming, A 189

Horseback on Sunday morning, 180

Horses 262

How exactly good it is 65

How fine to have a radio 350

How hard it is for me, who live 81

How joyful to be together, alone 315

How much poison are you willing 375

How to Be a Poet 354

However just and anxious I have been, 133

Hunting them a man must sweat, bear 237

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my 139

I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead, 118

I began to be followed by a voice saying: 134

I came out to the barn lot 231

I come to it again 236

I come to the fear of love 234

I dream an inescapable dream 72

I dream of you walking at night along the streams 167

I dreamed of my father when he was old. 342

I employ the blind mandolin player 21

I go in under foliage 303

I have been spared another day 111

I have taken in the light 169

I knew her when I saw her 316

I leave behind even 368

I love to lie down weary 120

I made an opening 186

I never have denied 320

I owned a slope full of stones. 116

I part the out thrusting branches 237

I see you down there, white-haired 346

I stood and heard the steps of the city 297

I tell my love in rhyme 194

I think of us lying asleep, 28

I think therefore 357

I was home alone. He came 334

I was walking in a dark valley 289

I was your rebellious son, 319

I will wait here in the fields 229

I would have each couple turn, 299

If you imagine 347

Imagination 332

In a Country Once Forested 345

In a country without saints or shrines 119

In a dream I go 349

In a dream I meet 238

In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Dr. Williams 317

In a time that breaks 80

In Art Rowanberry’s barn, where Art’s death 351

In Art Rowanberry’s Barn 351

In Extremis: Poems about My Father 334

In ignorance of the source, our want 286

In January cold, the year’s short light, 308

In Memory: Stuart Egnal 77

In my line of paperwork 247

In Rain 303

In the April rain I climbed up to drink 154

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, 122

In the dusk of the river, the wind 70

In the empty lot —a place 23

In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks 158

In the great circle, dancing in 301

In the mating of trees, 179

In the place that is my own place, whose earth 73

In the stilled place that once was a road going down 117

In the town’s graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself 74

In this woman the earth speaks. 141

In This World 128

Independence Day 132

Inlet, The 349

It is a day of the earth’s renewing without any man’s doings or 120

It is called moneywort 363

It is no longer necessary to sleep 13

“. . . it is not too soon to provide by every 177

It is presumptuous and irresponsible to pray for other people. A 148

It’s the immemorial feeling 231

Jason Needly found his father, old Ab, at work 380

July, 1773 253

June Wind 347

Kentucky River Junction 171

Late in the night I pay 147

Law That Marries All Things, The 284

Leader, The 358

Let him escape hospital and doctor, 55

Let me be plain with you, dear reader. 359

Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the 230

Let Us Pledge 322

Let us pledge allegiance to the flag, 322

Letter 288

Letter (to Ed McClanahan), A 369

Letter (to Ernest J. Gaines), A 373

Letter (to Hayden Carruth), A 372

Letter (to my brother), A 371

Life is your privilege, not your belonging. 238

Light and wind are running 347

Like a room, the clear stanza 19

Like a tide it comes in, 175

Like Snow 367

Lilies, The 132

Listen! 350

Long Hunter, The 196

Look It Over 368

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, 173

Love, all day there has been at the edge of my mind 111

Lover’s Song, A 323

Lysimachia Nummularia 363

Mad Farmer in the City, The 142

Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment, The 177

Mad Farmer Revolution, The 137

Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union, The 326

Mad Farmer’s Love Song, The 189

Make a place to sit down. 354

Man Born to Farming, The 115

Man Walking and Singing, A 13

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front 173

March 22, 1968 123

March Snow 68

Marriage 81

Marriage Song, A 308

Marriage, an Elegy, A 175

May Song 24

Meadow, The 74

Meditation in the Spring Rain 154

Meeting, A 238

Men Untrained to Comfort 380

Millennium, The 347

Morning’s News, The 124

Music, A 21

Must another poor body, brought 313

My gentle hill, I rest 291

My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves 61

My old friend tells us how the country changed: 310

My old friend, the owner 26

Necessity of Faith, The 242

New Roof, The 128

Noguchi Fountain 332

Nothing is simple, 251

Now constantly there is sound, 63

Now that you have gone 251

Now the old ways that have brought us 183

Observance 6

October 10 63

Old Elm Tree by the River, The 165

On a Theme of Chaucer 320

On the Hill Late at Night 129

On the housetop, the floor of the boundless 128

On the Theory of the Big Bang as the Origin of the Universe 367

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. 323

One faith is bondage. Two 189

One of Us 313

Ongoing Holy War Against Evil, The 358

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken, 242

Our Children, Coming of Age 301

Over the Edge 381

O when the world’s at peace 189

Paradise might have appeared here, 17

Parting, A 312

Passed through the dark wall, 196

Passing the Strait 300

Passing Thought, A 357

Peace of Wild Things, The 79

Plan, The 26

Planting Crocuses 186

Planting Trees 179

Planting trees early in the spring, 252

Poem 166

Poem for J. 195

Poem of Thanks, A 111

Porch over the River, The 70

Praise 129

Praise, A 129

Prayer after Eating 169

Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer 148

Purification, A 233

Questionnaire 375

Rain 120

Raindrops on the tin roof. 232

Reassurer, The 321

Recognition, The 185

Record, The 310

Rejected Husband, The 348

Requiem 267

Returning 289

Ripening 243

Rising 277

River Bridged and Forgot, The 292

Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer, The 151

Seeds, The 130

September 2, 1969 158

Setting Out 286

Seventeen seventy one 253

Seventeen Years 235

Seventy Years 357

Shrugging in the flight of its leaves, 165

Silence, The 127

Sits level, 332

Sleep 120

Slip, The 261

Snake, The 64

Some Further Words 359

Somehow it has all 176

Sometimes hidden from me 314

Song 194

Song (1) 286

Song (2) 291

Song (3) 297

Song (4) 302

Song in a Year of Catastrophe 134

Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall, A 176

Sorrel Filly, The 160

Sowing 117

Sparrow 20

Speech to the Garden Club of America, A 377

Spell the spiel of cause and effect, 307

Spring 332

Springs, The 119

Standing Ground, A 133

Star, The 240

Stay Home 229

Stone 346

Stones, The 116

Stop the killing, or 358

Storm, The 333

Strait, The 282

Supplanting, The 117

Suppose we did our work 367

Sycamore, The 73

Terrors are to come. The earth 66

Testament 190

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course; 377

The cloud is free only 284

The crops were made, the leaves 201

The dogs of indecision 193

The dust motes float 345

The ears stung with cold 69

The field mouse flickers 204

The first man who whistled 250

The first mosquito: 376

The fowls speak and sing, settling for the night. 122

The god of the river leans 6

The gods are less 241

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, 115

The hand is risen from the earth, 118

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees, 128

The hook of adrenaline shoves 182

The land is an ark, full of things waiting. 126

The leveling of the water, its increase 67

The longer we are together 243

The mad farmer, the thirsty one, 137

The mind is the continuity 40

The morning comes. The old woman, a spot 246

The morning lights 68

The opening out and out, 29

The poem is important, but 317

The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight 129

The river is of the earth 374

The river takes the land, and leaves nothing. 261

The rugs were rolled back to the wall 353

The sea is always arriving, 140

The seeds begin as abstract as their species, 130

The songs of small birds fade away 160

The stepping-stones, once 234

The tall marigolds darken. 25

The valley holds its shadow. 282

The wild cherries ripen, black and fat, 247

The wind scruffing it, the bay 12

The woods is shining this morning 79

The young woodland remembers 345

They 346

They are here again, 235

They lived long, and were faithful 175

They were into the lambing, up late. 143

Thief, The 28

Thirty More Years 314

This is a story handed down. 249

This man, proud and young, 325

Though the air is full of singing 181

Thought of Something Else, The 59

Three Elegiac Poems 55

Three, The 331

Through elm, buckeye, thorn, 209

Through the weeks of deep snow 239

Throwing Away the Mail 251

To a Siberian Woodsman 107

To a Writer of Reputation 356

To be at home on its native ground 269

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass 125

To Gary Snyder 230

To Go by Singing 22

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. 121

To Hayden Garruth 331

To Know the Dark 121

To know the inhabiting reasons 119

To love is to suffer –did I 328

To moralize a state, they drag out a man 124

To My Children, Fearing for Them 66

To My Mother 319

To search for what belongs where it is, 288

To Tanya at Christmas 290

To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday 346

To tell a girl you loved her—my God!— 381

To the Holy Spirit 242

To the Unseeable Animal 161

To Think of the Life of a Man 80

To What Listens 236

Traveling at Home 252

True harvests no mere intent may reap 242

Tu Fu 376

Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches 110

Until I have appeased the itch 309

Vacation, The 323

Venus of Botticelli, The 316

Voices Late at Night 309

Walking on the River Ice 251

Want of Peace, The 78

Warning to My Readers, A 248

Washed into the doorway 27

Way of Pain, The 244

We are others and the earth, 287

We lay in our bed as in a tomb 333

We Who Prayed and Wept 245

We who prayed and wept 245

We will see no more 267

Well, anyhow, I am 357

Wet Time, A 126

What banged? 367

What death means is not this—19

What is one to make of a life given 355

What must a man do to be at home in the world? 127

What she made in her body is broken. 195

What we have been becomes 197

What we leave behind to sleep 220

What wonder have you done to me? 346

What year 347

Wheel, The 298

When despair for the world grows in me 79

When he goes out in the morning 16

When I cannot be with you 333

When I was a boy here, 262

When I was a young man, 314

When I was young and lately wed 323

Where 204

Where the road came, no longer bearing men, 117

While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and BigBangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row 379

While the summer’s growth kept me 157

Why 348

Why all the embarassment 348

Wild Geese, The 180

Wild Rose, The 314

Wild, The 23

Willing to die, 166

Window Poems 83

Window. Window. 83

Winter Night Poem for Mary 121

Winter Nightfall 122

Winter Rain, The 67

Wish to Be Generous, The 130

Within the circles of our lives 302

Woods 237

Words 355

Work Song 217

You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper, 107

You put on my clothes 185

You will be walking some night 82

On the pages whose numbers are given below

the page end coincides with a stanza break:

4

151

10

152

24

190

37

253

41–44

259

46–54

340

134

359

145

362

149

380

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Preface: The Country of Déja Vu

THE BROKEN GROUND (1964)

Elegy

Observance

Boone

Green and White

A Man Walking and Singing

The Companions

The Aristocracy

The Bird Killer

An Architecture

Canticle

Sparrow

A Music

To Go By Singing

The Wild

May Song

The Fear of Darkness

The Plan

The Guest

The Thief

The Broken Ground

FINDINGS (1969)

The Design of the House: Ideal and Hard Time

The Handing Down

Three Elegiac Poems

OPENINGS (1968)

The Thought of Something Else

My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves

October 10

The Snake

The Cold

To My Children, Fearing for Them

The Winter Rain

March Snow

April Woods: Morning

The Finches

The Porch over the River

Before Dark

The Dream

The Sycamore

The Meadow

Against the War in Vietnam

Dark with Power

In Memory: Stuart Egnal

The Want of Peace

The Peace of Wild Things

Grace

To Think of the Life of a Man

Marriage

Do Not Be Ashamed

Window Poems

To a Siberian Woodsman

A Discipline

A Poem of Thanks

Envoy

FARMING: A HAND BOOK (1970)

The Man Born to Farming

The Stones

The Supplanting

Sowing

The Familiar

The Farmer Among the Tombs

For the Rebuilding of a House

The Springs

Rain

Sleep

To Know the Dark

Winter Night Poem for Mary

Winter Nightfall

February 2, 1968

March 22, 1968

The Morning’s News

Enriching the Earth

A Wet Time

The Silence

In This World

The New Roof

A Praise

On the Hill Late at Night

The Seeds

The Wish to Be Generous

Air and Fire

The Lilies

Independence Day

A Standing Ground

Song in a Year of Catastrophe

The Current

The Mad Farmer Revolution

The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

The Farmer and the Sea

Earth and Fire

The Mad Farmer in the City

The Birth (Near Port William)

Awake at Night

Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer

The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer

Meditation in the Spring Rain

The Grandmother

The Heron

September 2, 1969

The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments

The Sorrel Filly

To the Unseeable Animal

THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGE (1973)

The Old Elm Tree by the River

Poem

Breaking

The Country of Marriage

Prayer after Eating

Her First Calf

Kentucky River Junction

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

A Marriage, an Elegy

The Arrival

A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall

The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment

Planting Trees

The Wild Geese

The Silence

Anger Against Beasts

At a Country Funeral

The Recognition

Planting Crocuses

Praise

The Gathering

A Homecoming

The Mad Farmer’s Love Song

Testament

The Clear Days

Song

Poem for J.

The Long Hunter

An Anniversary

CLEARING (1977)

History

Where

The Clearing

Work Song

From the Crest

A PART (1980)

Stay Home

To Gary Snyder

For the Hog Killing

Goods

The Adze

The Cold Pane

Falling Asleep

A Purification

A Dance

The Fear of Love

Seventeen Years

To What Listens

Woods

The Lilies

Forty Years

A Meeting

Another Descent

Below

The Star

The Hidden Singer

The Necessity of Faith

To the Holy Spirit

Ripening

The Way of Pain

We Who Prayed and Wept

Grief

Fall

An Autumn Burning

A Warning to My Readers

Creation Myth

The First

Walking on the River Ice

Throwing Away the Mail

Except

For the Future

Traveling at Home

July, 1773

The Slip

Horses

THE WHEEL (1982)

Requiem

Elegy

Rising

Desolation

The Strait

The Law That Marries All Things

Setting Out

Song (1)

From the Distance

Letter

Returning

To Tanya at Christmas

Song (2)

The River Bridged and Forgot

The Gift of Gravity

Song (3)

The Wheel

The Dance

Passing the Strait

Our Children, Coming of Age

Song (4)

In Rain

ENTRIES (1994)

For the Explainers

A Marriage Song

Voices Late at Night

The Record

A Parting

One of Us

Thirty More Years

The Wild Rose

The Blue Robe

The Venus of Botticelli

In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Dr. Williams

To My Mother

On a Theme of Chaucer

The Reassurer

Let Us Pledge

The Vacation

A Lover’s Song

Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men

Air

The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union

Duality

The Three

To Hayden Carruth

Noguchi Fountain

Spring

Imagination

For an Absence

The Storm

In Extremis: Poems about My Father

Epitaph

Come Forth

GIVEN (2005)

Dust

In a Country Once Forested

To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday

They

Cathedral

Dante

The Millennium

June Wind

Why

The Rejected Husband

The Inlet

Listen!

In Art Rowanberry’s Barn

Burley Coulter’s Song for Kate Helen Branch

How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)

Words

To a Writer of Reputation

Seventy Years

A Passing Thought

The Leader

The Ongoing Holy War Against Evil

Some Further Words

Lysimachia Nummularia

LEAVINGS (2010)

Like Snow

On the Theory of the Big Bang as the Origin of the Universe

Look It Over

A Letter (to Ed McClanahan)

A Letter (to my brother)

A Letter (to Hayden Carruth)

A Letter (to Ernest J. Gaines)

Give It Time

Questionnaire

And I Beg Your Pardon

David Jones

Tu Fu

A Speech to the Garden Club of America (With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe)

While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and BigBangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row

Men Untrained to Comfort

Over the Edge

Index of Titles and First Lines