New Collected Poems Read online

  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 wi
ll 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.