New Collected Poems Read online

  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 sa
id, “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