New Collected Poems Read online

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 mo
re 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