New Collected Poems (2 page)

Index of Titles and First Lines

 

 

My old poems—I liked them all

well enough when they were new.

They came through the air, I wrote them down,

and sent them on, as also I fed

the birds who descended here to eat

as they were passing through. Now

I'm asked to read those poems again.

What for? They all are from the Country

of
Déjà Vu,
which is where

I have no need to go back to.

 

Pryor Thomas Berry

March 4, 1864 – February 23, 1946

All day our eyes could find no resting place.

Over a flood of snow sight came back

Empty to the mind. The sun

In a shutter of clouds, light

Staggered down the fall of snow.

All circling surfaces of earth were white.

No shape or shadow moved the flight

Of winter birds. Snow held the earth its silence.

We could pick no birdsong from the wind.

At nightfall our father turned his eyes away.

It was this storm of silence shook out his ghost.

We sleep; he only wakes

Who is unshapen in a night of snow.

His shadow in the shadow of the earth

Moves the dark to wholeness.

We wait beside his body here, his image

Shape of silence in the room.

Sifting

Down the wind, the winter rain

Spirals about the town

And the church hill's jut of stones.

Under the mounds, below

The weather's moving, the numb dead know

No fitfulness of wind.

On the road that in his knowledge ends

We bear our father to the earth.

We have adorned the shuck of him

With flowers as for a bridal, burned

Lamps about him, held death apart

Until the grave should mound it whole.

Behind us rain breaks the corners

Of our father's house, quickens

On the downslope to noise.

Our steps

Clamor in his silence, who tracked

The sun to autumn in the dust.

Below the hill

The river bears the rain away, that cut

His fields their shape and stood them dry.

Water wearing the earth

Is the shape of the earth,

The river flattening in its bends.

Their mingling held

Ponderable in his words—

Knowledge polished on a stone.

River and earth and sun and wind disjoint,

Over his silence flow apart. His words

Are sharp to memory as cold rain

But are not ours.

We stare dumb

Upon the fulcrum dust, across which death

Lifts up our love. There is no more to add

To this perfection. We turn away

Into the shadow of his death.

Time in blossom and fruit and seed,

Time in the dust huddles in his darkness.

The world, spun in its shadow, holds all.

Until the morning comes his death is ours.

Until morning comes say of the blind bird:

His feet are netted with darkness, or he flies

His heart's distance in the darkness of his eyes.

A season's sun will light him no tree green.

Spring tangles shadow and light,

Branches of trees

Knit vision and wind.

The shape of the wind is a tree

Bending, spilling its birds.

From the cloud to the stone

The rain stands tall,

Columned into his darkness.

The church hill heals our father in.

Our remembering moves from a different place.

The god of the river leans

against the shore in the early

morning, resting from his caprices;

the gentle sun parades

on his runneled gaze—he devotes

himself to watching it as one

devotes oneself to sleep;

the light becomes

his consciousness, warming him.

The river clears after the winter

floods; the slopes of the hills renew

the sun, diaphanous flower and leaf, blue-green

with distance;

this idle god dallies

in his shade, his mind adorned with stones.

At the river's edge there is singing;

the townsmen have come down from their sleep,

their singing silences the birds;

they sing renewal beyond irreparable

divisions.

The god did not expect

these worshippers, but he hears

them singing, briefly as reeds

grown up by the water;

they go

away, the river re-enters

their silence

—and he watches

a white towboat approach, shoving

its rust-colored island of barges,

the sound of its engines filling his mind

and draining out;

the forked wake

wrinkles on his vision, pointing

to the corner of his eye,

and floats away;

the holiday fishermen

arrive—

a man and his wife

establish themselves on a sandbar, bringing

lunch in a basket, blankets, tackle

down the path through the young

horseweeds;

the woman smooths

a blanket on the sand, and begins

a ponderous sunbath, her eyes

covered, her skirt hoisted

above her knees;

the man

casts a baited line downstream

and uncaps a beer:

the god observes;

these are the sundry

objects of his thought.

He has watched the passing

of other boats, assemblages,

seasons, inundations,

boatmen

whose voyages bore down the currents

to the dark shores of their eyes

—and has forgotten them, innocent

of his seasonal wraths, his mischiefs

accomplished and portending, as his present

forbearance is innocent;

the perfection

of his forgetting allows the sun

to glitter

—the light

flows away, its blue and white

peeling off the green waves.

His mind contains

the river as its banks

constrain it, in a single act

receiving it and letting it go.

Beyond this final house

I'll make no journeys, that is

the nature of this place,

I came here old; the house contains

the shade of its walls,

a fire in winter; I know

from what direction to expect the wind;

still

I move in the descent

of days from what was dreamed

to what remains.

In the stillness of this single place

where I'm resigned to die

I'm not free of journeys:

one eye watches while the other sleeps

—every day is a day's remove

from what I knew.

We held a country in our minds

which, unpossessed, allowed

the encroachment of our dreams;

our vision descended like doves

at morning on valleys still blue

in the extremity of hills

until we moved in a prodigy of reckonings,

sustaining in the toil of a journey

the rarity of our desire.

We came there at the end of spring,

climbing out of the hill's shadow

in the evening,

the light

leaned quiet on the trees,

we'd foreseen no words;

after nightfall when the coals of our fire

contained all that was left

of vision, my journey relinquished me

to sleep;

kindling in the uneasy

darkness where we

broached our coming to the place we'd dreamed

the dying green of those valleys

began to live.

My passage grew into that country

like a vine, as if remaining

when I'd gone, responsive to the season's

change, boding a continuance of eyes;

not the place or the distance

made it known to me,

but the direction so ardently obeyed,

preserving my advance

on the edge of virgin light,

broken by my shadow's stride;

I wouldn't recognize the way back.

I approach my death, descend

toward the last fact; it is

not so clear to me now as it once seemed;

when I hunted in the new lands

alone, I could foresee

the skeleton hiding with its wound

after the fear and flesh were gone;

now

it may come as a part of sleep.

In winter the river hides its flowing under the ice

—even then it flows,

bearing interminably down; the black crow flies

into the black night;

the bones of the old dead ache for the house fires.

Death is a conjecture of the seed

and the seasons bear it out;

the wild plum achieves its bloom,

perfects the yellow center of each flower,

submits to violence—

extravagance too grievous for praise;

there are no culminations, no

requitals.

Freed of distances

and dreams, about to die,

the mind turns back to its approaches:

what else have I known?

The search

withholds the joy from what is found,

that has been my sorrow;

love is no more than what remains

of itself.

There are no arrivals.

At the coming of winter

the birds obey the leviathan flock

that moves them south,

a rhythm of the blood that survives the cold

in pursuit of summer;

and the sun, innocent of time

as the blossom is innocent of ripeness,

faithful to solstice, returns—

and the flocks return;

the season recognizes them.

If it were possible now

I'd make myself submissive

to the weather

as an old tree, without retrospect

of winter, blossoming,

grateful for summers hatched from thrushes' eggs

in the speckled thickets

—obedient

to darkness,

be innocent of my dying.

The wind scruffing it, the bay

is like a field of green grass,

and the white seagulls afloat

in the hackling of the green bay

are like white flowers blooming

in the field,

for they are white

and come there, and are still

a while, and leave, and leaving

leave no sign they ever were there.

Green is no memorial to white.

There's danger in it. They fly

beyond idea till they come back.

for James Baker Hall