New Collected Poems Read online

  past holding or beholding,

  in whose flexing signature

  all the dooms assemble

  and become the lives of things.

  THE GIFT OF GRAVITY

  All that passes descends,

  and ascends again unseen

  into the light: the river

  coming down from the sky

  to hills, from hills to sea,

  and carving as it moves,

  to rise invisible,

  gathered to light, to return

  again. “The river’s injury

  is its shape.” I’ve learned no more.

  We are what we are given

  and what is taken away;

  blessed be the name

  of the giver and taker.

  For everything that comes

  is a gift, the meaning always

  carried out of sight

  to renew our whereabouts,

  always a starting place.

  And every gift is perfect

  in its beginning, for it

  is “from above, and cometh down

  from the Father of lights.”

  Gravity is grace.

  All that has come to us

  has come as the river comes,

  given in passing away.

  And if our wickedness

  destroys the watershed,

  dissolves the beautiful field,

  then I must grieve and learn

  that I possess by loss

  the earth I live upon

  and stand in and am. The dark

  and then the light will have it.

  I am newborn of pain

  to love the new-shaped shore

  where young cottonwoods

  take hold and thrive in the wound,

  kingfishers already nesting

  in a hole in the sheared bank.

  “What is left is what is”—

  have learned no more. The shore

  turns green under the songs

  of the fires of the world’s end,

  and what is there to do?

  Imagine what exists

  so that it may shine

  in thought light and day light,

  lifted up in the mind.

  The dark returns to light

  in the kingfisher’s blue and white

  richly laid together.

  He falls into flight

  from the broken ground,

  with strident outcry gathers

  air under his wings.

  In work of love, the body

  forgets its weight. And once

  again with love and singing

  in my mind, I come to what

  must come to me, carried

  as a dancer by a song.

  This grace is gravity.

  V

  SONG (3)

  I stood and heard the steps of the city

  and dreamed a lighter stepping than I heard,

  the tread of my people dancing in a ring.

  I knew that circle broken, the steps awry,

  stone and iron humming in the air.

  But I thought even there, among the straying

  steps, of the dance that circles life around,

  its shadows moving on the ground, in rhyme

  of flesh with flesh, time with time, our bliss,

  the earthly song that heavenly is.

  THE WHEEL

  for Robert Penn Warren

  At the first strokes of the fiddle bow

  the dancers rise from their seats.

  The dance begins to shape itself

  in the crowd, as couples join,

  and couples join couples, their movement

  together lightening their feet.

  They move in the ancient circle

  of the dance. The dance and the song

  call each other into being. Soon

  they are one—rapt in a single

  rapture, so that even the night

  has its clarity, and time

  is the wheel that brings it round.

  In this rapture the dead return.

  Sorrow is gone from them.

  They are light. They step

  into the steps of the living

  and turn with them in the dance

  in the sweet enclosure

  of the song, and timeless

  is the wheel that brings it round.

  THE DANCE

  I would have each couple turn,

  join and unjoin, be lost

  in the greater turning

  of other couples, woven

  in the circle of a dance,

  the song of long time flowing

  over them, so they may return,

  turn again in to themselves

  out of desire greater than their own,

  belonging to all, to each,

  to the dance, and to the song

  that moves them through the night.

  What is fidelity? To what

  does it hold? The point

  of departure, or the turning road

  that is departure and absence

  and the way home? What we are

  and what we were once

  are far estranged. For those

  who would not change, time

  is infidelity. But we are married

  until death, and are betrothed

  to change. By silence, so,

  I learn my song. I earn

  my sunny fields by absence, once

  and to come. And I love you

  as I love the dance that brings you

  out of the multitude

  in which you come and go.

  Love changes, and in change is true.

  PASSING THE STRAIT

  1.

  Forsaking all others, we

  are true to all. What we love

  here, we would not desecrate

  anywhere. Seed or song, work

  or sleep, no matter the need,

  what we let fall, we keep.

  2.

  The dance passes beyond us,

  our loves loving their loves,

  and returns, having passed through

  the breaths and sleeps of the world,

  the woven circuits of desire,

  which leaving here arrive here.

  Love moves in a bright sphere.

  3.

  Past the strait of kept faith

  the flesh rises, is joined

  to light. Risen from distraction

  and weariness, we come

  into the turning and changing

  circle of all lovers. On this height

  our labor changes into flight.

  OUR CHILDREN, COMING OF AGE

  In the great circle, dancing in

  and out of time, you move now

  toward your partners, answering

  the music suddenly audible to you

  that only carried you before

  and will carry you again.

  When you meet the destined ones

  now dancing toward you,

  we will be in line behind you,

  out of your awareness for the time,

  we whom you know, others we remember

  whom you do not remember, others

  forgotten by us all.

  When you meet, and hold love

  in your arms, regardless of all,

  the unknown will dance away from you

  toward the horizon of light.

  Our names will flutter

  on these hills like little fires.

  SONG (4)

  for Guy Davenport

  Within the circles of our lives

  we dance the circles of the years,

  the circles of the seasons

  within the circles of the years,

  the cycles of the moon

  within the circles of the seasons,

  the circles of our reasons

  within the cycles of the moon.

  Again, again we come and go


  changed, changing. Hands

  join, unjoin in love and fear,

  grief and joy. The circles turn,

  each giving into each, into all.

  Only music keeps us here,

  each by all the others held.

  In the hold of hands and eyes

  we turn in pairs, that joining

  joining each to all again.

  And then we turn aside, alone,

  out of the sunlight gone

  into the darker circles of return.

  VI

  IN RAIN

  1.

  I go in under foliage

  light with rain-light

  in the hill’s cleft,

  and climb, my steps

  silent as flight

  on the wet leaves.

  Where I go, stones

  are wearing away

  under the sky’s flow.

  2.

  The path I follow

  I can hardly see

  it is so faintly trod

  and overgrown.

  At times, looking,

  I fail to find it

  among dark trunks, leaves

  living and dead. And then

  I am alone, the woods

  shapeless around me.

  I look away, my gaze

  at rest among leaves,

  and then I see the path

  again, a dark way going on

  through the light.

  3.

  In a mist of light

  falling with the rain

  I walk this ground

  of which dead men

  and women I have loved

  are part, as they

  are part of me. In earth,

  in blood, in mind,

  the dead and living

  into each other pass,

  as the living pass

  in and out of loves

  as stepping to a song.

  The way I go is

  marriage to this place,

  grace beyond chance,

  love’s braided dance

  covering the world.

  4.

  Marriages to marriages

  are joined, husband and wife

  are plighted to all

  husbands and wives,

  any life has all lives

  for its delight.

  Let the rain come,

  the sun, and then the dark,

  for I will rest

  in any easy bed tonight.

  ENTRIES

  (1994)

  PART ONE

  Some Differences

  In Memory: Harlan and Anna Hubbard

  FOR THE EXPLAINERS

  Spell the spiel of cause and effect,

  Ride the long rail of fact after fact;

  What curled the plume in the drake’s tail

  And put the white ring around his neck?

  A MARRIAGE SONG

  In January cold, the year’s short light,

  We make new marriage here;

  The day is clear, the ground is bridal white,

  Songless the brittled air

  As we come through the snow to praise

  Our Mary in her day of days.

  In time’s short light, and less than light, we pray

  That odds be thus made evens,

  And earthly love in its uncertain way

  Be reconciled with Heaven’s.

  Before the early dark, we praise

  Our Mary in her day of days.

  Now let her honest, honored bridegroom come,

  All other choice foregone,

  To make his vows and claim and take her home,

  Their two lives made in one.

  He comes now through the snow to praise

  Our Mary in her day of days.

  All preparation past, and rightly glad,

  She makes her pledge for good

  Against all possibility of bad,

  Begins her womanhood,

  And as she walks the snow, we praise

  Our Mary in her day of days.

  Now, as her parents, we must stand aside,

  For what we owed we’ve paid her

  In far from perfect truth and love—this bride

  Is more than we have made her,

  And so we come in snow to praise

  Our Mary in her day of days.

  January 10, 1981

  VOICES LATE AT NIGHT

  Until I have appeased the itch

  To be a millionaire,

  Spare us, O Lord, relent and spare;

  Don’t end the world till it has made me rich.

  It ends in poverty.

  O Lord, until I come to fame

  I pray Thee, keep the peace;

  Allay all strife, let rancor cease

  Until my book may earn its due acclaim.

  It ends in strife, unknown.

  Since I have promised wealth to all,

  Bless our economy;

  Preserve our incivility

  And greed until the votes are cast this fall.

  Unknown, it ends in ruin.

  Favor the world, Lord, with Thy love;

  Spare us for what we’re not.

  I fear Thy wrath, and Hell is hot;

  Don't blow Thy trumpet until I improve.

  Worlds blaze; the trumpet sounds.

  O Lord, despite our right and wrong,

  Let Thy daylight come down

  Again on woods and field and town,

  To be our daily bread and daily song.

  It lives in bread and song.

  THE RECORD

  My old friend tell us how the country changed:

  where the grist mill was on Cane Run,

  now gone; where the peach orchard was,

  gone too; where the Springport Road was, gone

  beneath returning trees; how the creek ran three weeks

  after a good rain, long ago, no more;

  how when these hillsides first were plowed, the soil

  was black and deep, no stones, and that was long ago;

  where the wild turkeys roosted in the old days;

  “You’d have to know this country mighty well

  before I could tell you where.”

  And my young friend says: “Have him speak this

  into a recorder. It is precious. It should be saved.”

  I know the panic of that wish to save

  the vital knowledge of the old times, handed down,

  for it is rising off the earth, fraying away

  in the wind and the coming day.

  As the machines come and the people go

  the old names rise, chattering, and depart.

  But knowledge of my own going into old time

  tells me no. Because it must be saved,

  do not tell it to a machine to save it.

  That old man speaking you have heard

  since your boyhood, since his prime, his voice

  speaking out of lives long dead, their minds

  speaking in his own, by winter fires, in fields and woods,

  in barns while rain beat on the roofs

  and wind shook the girders. Stay and listen

  until he dies or you die, for death

  is in this, and grief is in it. Live here

  as one who knows these things. Stay, if you live;

  listen and answer. Listen to the next one

  like him, if there is to be one. Be

  the next one like him, if you must;

  stay and wait. Tell your children. Tell them

  to tell their children. As you depart

  toward the coming light, turn back

  and speak, as the creek steps downward

  over the rocks, saying the same changing thing

  in the same place as it goes.

  When the record is made, the unchanging

  word carried to a safe place

  in a time not here, the assemblage

  of minds dead and living, the loved lineage


  dispersed, silent, turned away, the dead

  dead at last, it will be too late.

  A PARTING

  From many hard workdays in the fields,

  many passages through the woods,

  many mornings on the river, lifting

  hooked lines out of the dark,

  from many nightfalls, many dawns,

  on the ridgetops and the creek road,

  as upright as a tree, as freely standing,

  Arthur Rowanberry comes in his old age

  into the care of doctors, into the prison

  of technical mercy, disease

  and hectic skill making their way

  into his body, hungry invaders fighting

  for claims in that dark homeland,

  strangers touching him, calling his name,

  and so he lies down at last

  in a bare room far from home.

  And we who know him come

  from the places he knew us in, and stand

  by his bed, and speak. He smiles

  and greets us from another time.

  We stand around him like a grove,

  a moment’s shelter, old neighborhood

  remade in that alien place. But the time

  we stand in is not his time.

  He is off in the places of his life,

  now only places in his mind,

  doing what he did in them when they were

  the world’s places, and he the world’s man:

  cutting the winter wood, piling the brush,

  fixing the fences, mending the roofs,

  caring for the crops under the long sun,

  loading up the wagon, heading home.

  ONE OF US

  Must another poor body, brought

  to its rest at last, be made the occasion

  of yet another sermon? Have we nothing

  to say of the dead that is not

  a dull mortal lesson to the living,

  our praise of Heaven blunted

  by this craven blaming of the earth?

  We must go with the body to the dark

  grave, and there at the edge turn back

  together—it is all that we can do—remembering

  her as she is now in our minds

  forever: how she gathered the chicks

  into her apron before the storm, and tossed

  the turkey hen over the fence,

  so that the little ones followed,