New Collected Poems Read online

  he dreamed of the spring woodsflowers

  standing in the ground,

  dark yet under the leaves and under

  the bare cold branches.

  But in his dream he knew their way

  was prepared, and in their time

  they would rise up joyful.

  And though he had dreamed earlier

  of strife, his sleep became peaceful.

  He said: If we, who have killed

  our brothers and hated ourselves,

  are made in the image of God,

  then surely the bloodroot,

  wild phlox, trillium and mayapple

  are more truly made

  in God’s image, for they have desired

  to be no more than they are,

  and they have spared each other.

  Their future

  is undiminished by their past.

  Let me, he said in his dream,

  become always less a soldier

  and more a man,

  for what is unopened in the ground

  is pledged to peace.

  When he woke and went out

  a flock of wild ducks that had fed

  on the river while he slept

  flew off in fear of him.

  And he walked, manly, into the new day.

  He came to his window

  where he sat and looked out,

  the earth before him, blessed

  by his dream of peace,

  bad history behind him.

  21.

  He has known a tunnel

  through the falling snow

  that brought him back at dark

  and nearly killed him on the way,

  the road white as the sky

  and the snow piling.

  Mortality crept up close

  in the darkness round his eyes.

  He felt his death’s wrenched avatars

  lying like silent animals

  along the ditch. He thought

  of his wife, his supper and his bed,

  and kept on, and made it.

  Now he sits at the window

  again, the country hard and bright

  in this winter’s coldest morning.

  The river, unfrozen still,

  gives off a breath of smoke

  that flows upstream with the wind.

  Behind him that burrow

  along the wild road

  grows certain in his mind,

  leading here, surely. It has arrived

  at the window, and is clarified.

  Now he has learned another way

  he can come here. Luck

  taught him, and desire.

  The snow lies under the woods

  and February is ending.

  Far off, another way, he hears

  the flute of spring,

  an old-style traveler,

  wandering through the trees.

  22.

  Still sleeping, he heard

  the phoebe call, and woke to it,

  and winter passed out of his mind.

  The bird, in the high branches

  above the road-culvert mouth,

  sang to what was sleeping,

  two notes, clear and

  harsh. The stream came,

  full-voiced, down the rocks

  out of the woods. The wood ducks

  have come back to nest

  in the old hollow sycamore.

  The window has changed, no longer

  remembering, but waiting.

  23.

  He stood on the ground

  and saw his wife borne away

  in the air, and suddenly

  knew her. It is not the sky

  he trusts her to, or her flight,

  but to herself as he saw her

  turn back and smile. And he

  turned back to the buried garden

  where the spring flood rose.

  The window is made strange

  by these days he has come to.

  She is the comfort of the rooms

  she leaves behind her.

  24.

  His love returns

  and walks among the trees,

  a new time lying beneath

  the leaves at her feet.

  There are songs in the ground

  audible to her. She enters

  the dark globe of sleep,

  waking the tree frogs

  whose songs star the silence

  in constellations. She wakens

  the birds of mornings. The sun

  makes a low gentle piping.

  The bloodroot rises in its folded

  leaf, and there is a tensing

  in the woods. There is

  no window where she is.

  All is clear where the light begins

  to dress the branch in green.

  25.

  The bloodroot is white

  in the woods, and men renew

  their abuse of the world

  and each other. Abroad

  we burn and maim

  in the name of principles

  we no longer recognize in acts.

  At home our flayed land

  flows endlessly

  to burial in the sea.

  When mortality is not heavy

  on us, humanity is—

  public meaninglessness

  preying on private meaning.

  As the weather warms, the driven

  swarm into the river,

  pursued by whining engines,

  missing the world

  as they pass over it,

  every man

  his own mosquito.

  26.

  In the heron’s eye

  is one of the dies of change.

  Another

  is in the sun.

  Each thing is carried

  beyond itself.

  The man of the window

  lives at the edge,

  knowing the approach

  of what must be, joy

  and dread.

  Now the old sycamore

  yields at its crown

  a dead branch.

  It will sink like evening

  into its standing place.

  The young trees rise,

  and the dew is on them,

  and the heat of the day

  is on them, and the dark

  —end and beginning

  without end.

  27.

  Now that April with sweet rain

  has come to Port William again,

  Burley Coulter rows out

  on the river to fish.

  He sits all day in his boat,

  tied to a willow, his hat

  among green branches,

  his dark line curving

  in the wind. He is one

  with the sun.

  The current’s horses graze

  in the shade along the banks.

  The watcher leaves his window

  and goes out.

  He sits in the woods, watched

  by more than he sees.

  What is his is

  past. He has come

  to a rootless place

  and a windowless.

  There is a wild light

  his mind loses

  until the spring renews,

  but it holds his mind

  and will not let it rest.

  The window is a fragment

  of the world suspended

  in the world, the known

  adrift in mystery.

  And now the green

  rises. The window has an edge

  that is celestial,

  where the eyes are surpassed.

  TO A SIBERIAN WOODSMAN

  (after looking at some pictures in a magazine)

  1.

  You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper,

  listening to your daughter play the accordion. You smile

  with the pleasure of a man confi
dent in his hands, resting

  after a day of long labor in the forest, the cry of the saw

  in your head, and the vision of coming home to rest.

  Your daughter’s face is clear in the joy of hearing

  her own music. Her fingers live on the keys

  like people familiar with the land they were born in.

  You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son,

  tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams.

  Over you, as your hands work, is the dream of the still pools.

  Over you is the dream

  of your silence while the east brightens, birds waking close by

  you in the trees.

  2.

  I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn,

  your son in your tracks.

  You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest

  whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound

  of your own voice

  or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to

  speak,

  and soon the voice of the stream rises ahead of you, and you

  take the path beside it.

  I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over

  you

  as you come to the pool where you will fish, and of the mist

  drifting

  over the water, and of the cast fly resting light on the face of the

  pool.

  3.

  And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself

  in the world. I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy

  and slow along the feet of the trees. I hear the voices of the wren

  and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the

  windows

  and over the roof. In my house my daughter learns the

  womanhood

  of her mother. My son is at play, pretending to be

  the man he believes I am. I am the outbreathing of this ground.

  My words are its words as the wren’s song is its song.

  4.

  Who has invented our enmity? Who has prescribed us

  hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other

  with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger

  that I should desire the burning of your house or the

  destruction of your children?

  Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the

  thought

  that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and

  rivers, and the silence of birds?

  Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange

  to you, and the voices of your land strange to me?

  Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to

  destroy you,

  or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has

  imagined

  that your death could be negligible to me now that I have seen

  these pictures of your face?

  Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,

  or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with

  you in the forest?

  And now one of the ideas of my place will be that you would

  gladly talk and visit and work with me.

  5.

  I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in.

  As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as

  carefully as they hold to it.

  I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the

  sycamore,

  or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the

  walnut,

  nor has the elm bowed before the monuments or sworn the oath

  of allegiance.

  They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.

  6.

  In the thought of you I imagine myself free of the weapons and

  the official hates that I have borne on my back like a

  hump,

  and in the thought of myself I imagine you free of weapons and

  official hates,

  so that if we should meet we would not go by each other

  looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their

  burdens,

  but would stand clear in the gaze of each other.

  7.

  There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with

  you in silence beside the forest pool.

  There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose

  hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

  There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who

  dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.

  There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he

  comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.

  A DISCIPLINE

  Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches

  on every side, there is no other place

  to turn. Dawning in your veins

  is the light of the blast

  that will print your shadow on stone

  in a last antic of despair

  to survive you in the dark.

  Man has put his history to sleep

  in the engine of doom. It flies

  over his dreams in the night,

  a blazing cocoon. O gaze into the fire

  and be consumed with man’s despair,

  and be still, and wait. And then see

  the world go on with the patient work

  of seasons, embroidering birdsong

  upon itself as for a wedding, and feel

  your heart set out in the morning

  like a young traveler, arguing the world

  from the kiss of a pretty girl.

  It is the time’s discipline to think

  of the death of all living, and yet live.

  A POEM OF THANKS

  I have been spared another day

  to come into this night

  as though there is a mercy in things

  mindful of me. Love, cast all

  thought aside. I cast aside

  all thought. Our bodies enter

  their brief precedence,

  surrounded by their sleep.

  Through you I rise, and you

  through me, into the joy

  we make, but may not keep.

  ENVOY

  Love, all day there has been at the edge of my mind

  the wish that my life would hurry on,

  my days pass quickly and be done,

  for I felt myself a man carrying a loose tottering bundle

  along a narrow scaffold: if I could carry it

  fast enough, I could hold it together to the end.

  Now, leaving my perplexity and haste,

  I come within the boundaries of your life, an interior

  clear and calm. You could not admit me burdened.

  I approach you clean as a child of all that has been with me.

  You speak to me in the dark tongue of my joy

  that you do not know. In you I know

  the deep leisure of the filling moon. May I live long.

  FARMING: A HAND BOOK

  (1970)

  For Owen and Loyce Flood

  THE MAN BORN TO FARMING

  The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

  whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,

  to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death

  yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down

  in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

  His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

  What miraculous seed has he swallowed

  that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mo
uth

  like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

  descending in the dark?

  THE STONES

  I owned a slope full of stones.

  Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,

  shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks

  where the earth caught and kept them

  dark, an old music mute in them

  that my head keeps now I have dug them out.

  I broke them where they slugged in their dark

  cells, and lifted them up in pieces.

  As I piled them in the light

  I began their music. I heard their old lime

  rouse in breath of song that has not left me.

  I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.

  What bond have I made with the earth,

  having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing

  I have carried with me out of that day.

  The stones have given me music

  that figures for me their holes in the earth

  and their long lying in them dark.

  They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,

  and I must prepare a fitting silence.

  THE SUPPLANTING

  Where the road came, no longer bearing men,

  but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,

  the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils

  rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic

  and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle

  with white bloom. For a while in the years of its wilderness

  a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there

  in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire

  to the remnants of house and shed, and let time

  hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all

  would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste

  like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed

  then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me

  something that would not bear my name—something that

  bears us

  through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

  SOWING

  In the stilled place that once was a road going down

  from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew