New Collected Poems Read online

  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

&n
bsp; 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