New Collected Poems Read online

  6.

  A warm day in December,

  and the rain falling

  steadily through the morning

  as the man works

  at his table, the window

  staring into the valley

  as though conscious

  when he is not. The cold river

  steams in the warm air.

  It is rising. Already

  the lowest willows

  stand in the water

  and the swift currents

  fold round them.

  The bare twigs of the elms

  are beaded with bright drops

  that grow slowly heavy

  and fall, bigger

  and slower than the rain.

  A fox squirrel comes

  through the trees, hurrying

  someplace, but it seems

  to be raining everywhere,

  and he submits to wetness

  and sits still, miserable

  maybe, for an hour.

  How sheltering and clear

  the window seems, the dry fireheat

  inside, and outside the gray

  downpour. As the man works

  the weather moves

  upon his mind, its dreariness

  a kind of comfort.

  7.

  Outside the window

  is a roofed wooden tray

  he fills with seeds for the birds.

  They make a sort of dance

  as they descend and light

  and fly off at a slant

  across the strictly divided

  black sash. At first

  they came fearfully, worried

  by the man’s movements

  inside the room. They watched

  his eyes, and flew

  when he looked. Now they expect

  no harm from him

  and forget he’s there.

  They come into his vision,

  unafraid. He keeps

  a certain distance and quietness

  in tribute to them.

  That they ignore him

  he takes in tribute to himself.

  But they stay cautious

  of each other, half afraid, unwilling

  to be too close. They snatch

  what they can carry and fly

  into the trees. They flirt out

  with tail or beak and waste

  more sometimes then they eat.

  And the man, knowing

  the price of seed, wishes

  they would take more care.

  But they understand only

  what is free, and he

  can give only as they

  will take. Thus they have

  enlightened him. He buys

  the seed, to make it free.

  8.

  The river is rising,

  approaching the window

  in awful nearness.

  Over it the air holds

  a tense premonition

  of the water’s dark body

  living where yesterday

  things breathed. As he works

  through the morning

  the man has trouble

  in the corner of his eye,

  whole trees turning

  in the channel as they go by,

  the currents loaded

  with the trash of the woods

  and the trash of towns,

  bearing down, and rising.

  9.

  There is a sort of vertical

  geography that portions his life.

  Outside, the chickadees

  and titmice scrounge

  his sunflower seed. The cardinals

  feed like fires on mats of drift

  lying on the currents

  of the swollen river.

  The air is a bridge

  and they are free. He imagines

  a necessary joy

  in things that must fly

  to eat. He is set apart

  by the black grid of the window

  and, below it, the table

  of the contents of his mind:

  notes and remnants,

  uncompleted work,

  unanswered mail,

  unread books

  —the subjects of conscience,

  his yoke-fellow,

  whose whispered accounting

  has stopped one ear, leaving him

  half deaf to the world.

  Some pads of paper,

  eleven pencils,

  a leaky pen,

  a jar of ink

  are his powers. He’ll

  never fly.

  10.

  Rising, the river

  is wild. There is no end

  to what one may imagine

  whose lands and buildings

  lie in its reach. To one

  who has felt his little boat

  taken this way and that

  in the braided currents

  it is beyond speech.

  “What’s the river doing?”

  “Coming up.”

  In Port Royal, that begins

  a submergence of minds.

  Heads are darkened.

  To the man at work

  through the mornings

  in the long-legged cabin

  above the water, there is

  an influence of the rise

  that he feels in his footsoles

  and in his belly

  even when he thinks

  of something else. The window

  looks out, like a word,

  upon the wordless, fact

  dissolving into mystery, darkness

  overtaking light.

  And the water reaches a height

  it can only fall from, leaving

  the tree trunks wet.

  It has made a roof

  to its rising, and become

  a domestic thing.

  It lies down in its place

  like a horse in his stall.

  Facts emerge from it:

  drift it has hung in the trees,

  stranded cans and bottles,

  new carving in the banks

  —a place of change, changed.

  It leaves a mystic plane

  in the air, a membrane

  of history stretched between

  the silt-lines on the banks,

  a depth that for months

  the man will go from his window

  down into, knowing

  he goes within the reach

  of a dark power: where

  the birds are, fish

  were.

  11.

  How fine

  to have a long-legged house

  with a many-glassed window

  looking out on the river

  —and the wren singing

  on a winter morning! How fine

  to sweep the floor,

  opening the doors

  to let the air change,

  and then to sit down

  in the freshened room,

  day pouring in the window!

  But this is only for a while.

  This house was not always

  here. Another stood

  in its place, and weathered

  and grew old. He tore it down

  and used the good of it

  to build this. And farther on

  another stood

  that is gone. Nobody

  alive now knows

  how it looked, though some

  recall a springhouse

  that is gone too now. The stones

  strew the pasture grass

  where a roan colt grazes

  and lifts his head to snort

  at commotions in the wind.

  All passes, and the man

  at work in the house

  has mostly ceased to mind.

  There will be pangs

  of ending, and he regrets

  the terrors men bring to men.

  But all passes—th
ere is even

  a kind of solace in that.

  He has imagined animals

  grazing at nightfall

  on the place where his house stands.

  Already his spirit

  is with them, with a strange attentiveness,

  hearing the grass

  quietly tearing as they graze.

  12.

  The country where he lives

  is haunted

  by the ghost of an old forest.

  In the cleared fields

  where he gardens

  and pastures his horses

  it stood once,

  and will return. There will be

  a resurrection of the wild.

  Already it stands in wait

  at the pasture fences.

  It is rising up

  in the waste places of the cities.

  When the fools of the capitals

  have devoured each other

  in righteousness,

  and the machines have eaten

  the rest of us, then

  there will be the second coming

  of the trees. They will come

  straggling over the fences

  slowly, but soon enough.

  The highways will sound

  with the feet of the wild herds,

  returning. Beaver will ascend

  the streams as the trees

  close over them.

  The wolf and the panther

  will find their old ways

  through the nights. Water

  and air will flow clear.

  Certain calamities

  will have passed,

  and certain pleasures.

  The wind will do without

  corners. How difficult

  to think of it: miles and miles

  and no window.

  13.

  Sometimes he thinks the earth

  might be better without humans.

  He’s ashamed of that.

  It worries him,

  him being a human, and needing

  to think well of the others

  in order to think well of himself.

  And there are

  a few he thinks well of,

  a few he loves

  as well as himself almost,

  and he would like to say

  better. But history

  is so largely unforgivable.

  And now his mighty government

  wants to help everybody

  even if it has to kill them

  to do it—like the fellow in the story

  who helped his neighbor to Heaven:

  “I heard the Lord calling him,

  Judge, and I sent him on.”

  According to the government

  everybody is just waiting

  to be given a chance

  to be like us. He can’t

  go along with that.

  Here is a thing, flesh of his flesh,

  that he hates. He would like

  a little assurance

  that no one will destroy the world

  for some good cause.

  Until he dies, he would like his life

  to pertain to the earth.

  But there is something in him

  that will wait, even

  while he protests,

  for things turn out as they will.

  Out his window this morning

  he saw nine ducks in flight,

  and a hawk dive at his mate

  in delight.

  The day stands apart

  from the calendar. There is a will

  that receives it as enough.

  He is given a fragment of time

  in this fragment of the world.

  He likes it pretty well.

  14.

  The longest night is past.

  It is the blessed morning of the year.

  Beyond the window, snow

  in patches on the river bank,

  frosty sunlight on the dry corn,

  and buds on the water maples

  red, red in the cold.

  15.

  The sycamore gathers

  out of the sky, white

  in the glance that looks up to it

  through the black crisscross

  of the window. But it is not a glance

  that it offers itself to.

  It is no lightning stroke

  caught in the eye. It stays,

  an old holding in place.

  And its white is not so pure

  as a glance would have it,

  but emerges partially,

  the tree’s renewal of itself,

  among the mottled browns

  and olives of the old bark.

  Its dazzling comes into the sun

  a little at a time

  as though a god in it

  is slowly revealing himself.

  How often the man of the window

  has studied its motley trunk,

  the out-starting of its branches,

  its smooth crotches,

  its revelations of whiteness,

  hoping to see beyond his glances,

  the distorting geometry

  of preconception and habit,

  to know it beyond words.

  All he has learned of it

  does not add up to it.

  There is a bird who nests in it

  in the summer and seems to sing of it—

  the quick lights among its leaves

  —better than he can.

  It is not by his imagining

  its whiteness comes.

  The world is greater than its words.

  To speak of it the mind must bend.

  16.

  His mind gone from the window

  into dark thought, suddenly

  a flash of water

  lights in the corner of his eye:

  the kingfisher is rising,

  laden, out of his plunge,

  the water still subsiding

  under the bare willow.

  The window becomes a part

  of his mind’s history, the entrance

  of days into it. And awake

  now, watching the water flow

  beyond the glass, his mind

  is watched by a spectre of itself

  that is a window on the past.

  Life steadily adding

  its subtractions, it has fallen

  to him to remember

  and old man who, dying,

  dreamed of his garden,

  a harvest so bountiful

  he couldn’t carry it home

  —another who saw

  in the flaws of the moon

  a woman’s face

  like a cameo.

  17.

  For a night and a day

  his friend stayed here

  on his way across the continent.

  In the afternoon they walked

  down from Port Royal

  to the river, following

  for a while the fall of Camp Branch

  through the woods,

  then crossing the ridge

  and entering the woods again

  on the valley rim. They talked

  of history—men who saw visions

  of crops where the woods stood

  and stand again, the crops

  gone. They ate the cold apples

  they carried in their pockets.

  They lay on a log in the sun

  to rest, looking up

  through bare branches at the sky.

  They saw a nuthatch walk

  in a loop on the side of a tree

  in a late patch of light

  while below them the Lexington

  shoved sand up the river,

  her diesels shaking the air.

  They walked along trees

  across ravines. Now his friend

  is back on the highway, and he sits again

  at his window. Another day.

/>   During the night snow fell.

  18.

  The window grows fragile

  in a time of war.

  The man seated beneath it

  feels its glass turn deadly.

  He feels the nakedness

  of his face and throat.

  Its shards and splinters balance

  in transparence, delicately

  seamed. In the violence

  of men against men, it will not last.

  In any mind turned away

  in hate, it will go blind,

  Men spare one another

  by will. When there is hate

  it is joyous to kill. And he

  has borne the hunger to destroy,

  riding anger like a captain,

  savage, exalted and blind.

  There is war in his veins

  like a loud song.

  He has known his heart to rise

  in glad holocaust against his kind,

  and felt hard in thigh and arm

  the thew of fury.

  19.

  Peace. May he waken

  not too late from his wraths

  to find his window still

  clear in its wall, and the world

  there. Within things

  there is peace, and at the end

  of things. It is the mind

  turned away from the world

  that turns against it.

  The armed presidents stand

  on deadly islands in the air,

  overshadowing the crops.

  Peace. Let men, who cannot be brothers

  to themselves, be brothers

  to mulleins and daisies

  that have learned to live on the earth.

  Let them understand the pride

  of sycamores and thrushes

  that receive the light gladly, and do not

  think to illuminate themselves.

  Let them know that the foxes and the owls

  are joyous in their lives,

  and their gayety is praise to the heavens,

  and they do not raven with their minds.

  In the night the devourer,

  and in the morning all things

  find the light a comfort.

  Peace. The earth turns

  against all living, in the end.

  And when mind has not outraged

  itself against its nature,

  they die and become the place

  they lived in. Peace to the bones

  that walk in the sun toward death,

  for they will come to it soon enough.

  Let the phoebes return in spring

  and build their nest of moss

  in the porch rafters,

  and in autumn let them depart.

  Let the garden be planted,

  and let the frost come.

  Peace to the porch and the garden.

  Peace to the man in the window.

  20.

  In the early morning dark