New Collected Poems Read online

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
r />   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