New Collected Poems (16 page)

Like a tide it comes in,

wave after wave of foliage and fruit,

the nurtured and the wild,

out of the light to this shore.

In its extravagance we shape

the strenuous outline of enough.

Somehow it has all

added up to song—

earth, air, rain and light,

the labor and the heat,

the mortality of the young.

I will go free of other

singing, I will go

into the silence

of my songs, to hear

this song clearly.

“. . . it is not too soon to provide by every

possible means that as few as possible shall be

without a little portion of land. The small

landholders are the most precious part of a state.”

Jefferson, to Reverend James Madison, October 28, 1785.

That is the glimmering vein

of our sanity, dividing from us

from the start: land under us

to steady us when we stood,

free men in the great communion

of the free. The vision keeps

lighting in my mind, a window

on the horizon in the dark.

To be sane in a mad time

is bad for the brain, worse

for the heart. The world

is a holy vision, had we clarity

to see it—a clarity that men

depend on men to make.

It is
ignorant
money I declare

myself free from, money fat

and dreaming in its sums, driving

us into the streets of absence,

stranding the pasture trees

in the deserted language of banks.

And I declare myself free

from ignorant love. You easy lovers

and forgivers of mankind, stand back!

I will love you at a distance,

and not because you deserve it.

My love must be discriminate

or fail to bear its weight.

In the mating of trees,

the pollen grain entering invisible

the domed room of the winds, survives

the ghost of the old forest

that stood here when we came. The ground

invites it, and it will not be gone.

I become the familiar of that ghost

and its ally, carrying in a bucket

twenty trees smaller than weeds,

and I plant them along the way

of the departure of the ancient host.

I return to the ground its original music.

It will rise out of the horizon

of the grass, and over the heads

of the weeds, and it will rise over

the horizon of men's heads. As I age

in the world it will rise and spread,

and be for this place horizon

and orison, the voice of its winds.

I have made myself a dream to dream

of its rising, that has gentled my nights.

Let me desire and wish well the life

these trees may live when I

no longer rise in the mornings

to be pleased by the green of them

shining, and their shadows on the ground,

and the sound of the wind in them.

Horseback on Sunday morning,

harvest over, we taste persimmon

and wild grape, sharp sweet

of summer's end. In time's maze

over the fall fields, we name names

that went west from here, names

that rest on graves. We open

a persimmon seed to find the tree

that stands in promise,

pale, in the seed's marrow.

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear,

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye

clear. What we need is here.

Though the air is full of singing

my head is loud

with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich

with fruit, my tongue

hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden

I cannot stand beside it

mute, but must say

“It is golden,” while the leaves

stir and fall with a sound

that is not a name.

It is in the silence

that my hope is, and my aim.

A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing

sounds men's silence

like a root. Let my say

and not mourn: the world

lives in the death of speech

and sings there.

The hook of adrenaline shoves

into the blood. Man's will,

long schooled to kill or have

its way, would drive the beast

against nature, transcend

the impossible in simple fury.

The blow falls like a dead seed.

It is defeat, for beasts

do not pardon, but heal or die

in the absence of the past.

The blow survives in the man.

His triumph is a wound. Spent,

he must wait the slow

unalterable forgiveness of time.

Now the old ways that have brought us

farther than we remember sink out of sight

as under the treading of many strangers

ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while

they are cast clear again upon the mind

as at a country funeral where, amid the soft

lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive

solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,

persist the usages of old neighborhood.

Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,

knowing the extremity they have come to,

one of the their own bearing to the earth the last

of his light, his darkness the sun's definitive mark.

They stand and think as they stood and thought

when even the gods were different.

And the organ music, though decorous

as for somebody else's grief, has its source

in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,

and on naked hillsides by the open grave,

eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,

and across the sea. How long a time?

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let my hide my

self in Thee. They came, once in time,

in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned

to the world. The fields and the work

remained to be returned to. Now the entrance

of one of the old ones into the Rock

too often means a lifework perished from the land

without inheritor, and the field goes wild

and the house sits and stares. Or it passes

at cash value into the hands of strangers.

Now the old dead wait in the open coffin

for the blood kin to gather, come home

for one last time, to hear old men

whose tongues bear an essential topography

speak memories doomed to die.

But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,

is one of the land's seeds, as a seed

is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,

to pass on into life the knowledge

of what has died. What we owe the future

is not a new start, for we can only begin

with what has happened. We owe the future

the past, the long knowledge

that is the potency of time to come.

That makes of a man's grave a rich furrow.

The community of knowing in common is the seed

of our life in this place. There is not only

no better possibility, there is no

other, except for chaos and darkness,

the terrible ground of the only possible

new start. And so as the old die and the young

depart, where shall a man go who keeps

the memories of the dead, except home

again, as one would go back after a burial,

faithful to the fields, lest the dead die

a second and more final death.

You put on my clothes

and it was as though

we met some other place

and I looked and knew

you. This is what we keep

going through, the lyrical

changes, the strangeness

in which I know again

what I have known before.

I made an opening

to reach through blind

into time, through

sleep and silence, to new

heat, a new rising,

a yellow flower opening

in the sound of bees.

Deathly was the giving

of that possibility

to a motion of the world

that would bring it

out, bright, in time.

My mind pressing in

through the earth's

dark motion toward

bloom, I thought of you,

glad there is no escape.

It is this we will be

turning and re-

turning to.

Don't think of it.

Vanity is absence.

Be here. Here

is the root and stem

unappraisable

on whose life

your life depends

Be here

like the water

of the hill

that fills each

opening it

comes to, to leave

with a sound

that is a part

of local speech.

At my age my father

held me on his arm

like a hooded bird,

and his father held him so.

Now I grow into brotherhood

with my father as he

with his has grown,

time teaching me

his thoughts in my own.

Now he speaks in me

as when I knew him first,

as his father spoke

in him when he had come

to thirst for the life

of a young son. My son

will know me in himself

when his son sits hooded on

his arm and I have grown

to be brother to all

my fathers, memory

speaking to knowledge,

finally, in my bones.

One faith is bondage. Two

are free. In the trust

of old love, cultivation shows

a dark graceful wilderness

at its heart. Wild

in that wilderness, we roam

the distances of our faith,

safe beyond the bounds

of what we know. O love,

open. Show me

my country. Take me home.

O when the world's at peace

and every man is free

then will I go down unto my love.

O and I may go down

several times before that.

And now to the Abbyss I pass

Of that unfathomable Grass…

Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath

Grows large and free in air, don't call it death—

A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire

His surly art of imitating life; conspire

Against him. Say that my body cannot now

Be improved upon; it has no fault to show

To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh

Has a perfection in compliance with the grass

Truer than any it could have striven for.

You will recognize the earth in me, as before

I wished to know it in myself: my earth

That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,

And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,

And all my hopes. Say that I have found

A good solution, and am on my way

To the roots. And say I have left my native clay

At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.

Traveler to where? Say you don't know.

But do not let your ignorance

Of my spirit's whereabouts dismay

You, or overwhelm your thoughts.

Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever

Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger

Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought

Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous

To me and to yourselves. Why settle

For some know-it-all's despair

When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?

And remember that the Heavenly soil

Need not be too rich to please

One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,

A new and better man, toward

That town. The thought's unreasonable,

But so is life, thank the Lord!

So treat me, even dead,

As a man who has a place

To go, and something to do

Don't muck up my face