New Collected Poems (20 page)

You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods

where the old trees

move only with the wind

and then with gravity.

In the stillness of the trees

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

After we saw the wild ducks

and walked away, drawing out

the quiet that had held us,

in wonder of them and of ourselves,

Den said, “I wish Mr. Snyder

had been here.” And I said, “Yes.”

But it cannot be often as it was

when we heard geese in the air

and ran out of the house to see them

wavering in long lines, high,

southward, out of sight.

By division we speak, out of wonder.

Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the eye,

let them die while the sound of the shot is in the air, let them die as they fall,

let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let its freshet be full,

let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around,

for today we celebrate again our lives' wedding with the world,

for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond.

It's the immemorial feelings

I like the best: hunger, thirst,

their satisfaction; work-weariness,

earned rest; the falling again

from loneliness to love;

the green growth the mind takes

from the pastures in March;

The gayety in the stride

of a good team of Belgian mares

that seems to shudder from me

through all my ancestry.

I came out to the barn lot

near nightfall, past supper time,

where he stood at work still

with the adze, that had to be

finely used or it would wound

the user—a lean old man

whose passion was to know

what a man could do in a day

and how a tool empowered the hand.

He paused to warn: stay back

from what innocence made dangerous.

I stayed back, and he went on

with what he had to do

while dark fell round him.

Between the living world

and the world of death

is a clear, cold pane;

a man who looks too close

must fog it with his breath,

or hold his breath too long.

Raindrops on the tin roof.

What do they say?

We have all

Been here before.

At start of spring I open a trench

in the ground. I put into it

the winter's accumulation of paper,

pages I do not want to read

again, useless words, fragments,

errors. And I put into it

the contents of the outhouse:

light of the sun, growth of the ground,

finished with one of their journeys.

To the sky, to the wind, then,

and to the faithful trees, I confess

my sins: that I have not been happy

enough, considering my good luck;

have listened to too much noise;

have been inattentive to wonders;

have lusted after praise.

And then upon the gathered refuse

of mind and body, I close the trench,

folding shut again the dark,

the deathless earth. Beneath that seal

the old escapes into the new.

The stepping-stones, once

in a row along the slope,

have drifted out of line,

pushed by frosts and rains.

Walking is no longer thoughtless

over them, but alert as dancing,

as tense and poised, to step

short, and long, and then

longer, right, and then left.

At the winter's end, I dance

the history of its weather.

I come to the fear of love

as I have often come,

to what must be desired

and to what must be done.

Only love can quiet the fear

of love, and only love can save

from diminishment the love

that we must lose to have.

We stand as in an open field,

blossom, leaf, and stem,

rooted and shaken in our day,

heads nodding in the wind.

They are here again,

the locusts I baited my lines with

in the summer we married.

The light is filled

with the song the ground exhales

once in seventeen years.

And we are here with the wear

and the knowledge of those years,

understanding the song

of locusts no better than then,

knowing the future no more than they

who give themselves so long

to the dark. What can we say,

who grow older in love?

Marriage is not made

but in dark time, in the rhymes,

the returns of song,

that mark time's losses.

They open our eyes

to the dark, and we marry again.

   
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I come to it again

and again, the thought of the wren

opening his song here

to no human ear—

no woman to look up,

no man to turn his head.

The farm will sink then

from all we have done and said.

Beauty will lie, fold

on fold, upon it. Foreseeing

it so, I cannot withhold

love. But from the height

and distance of foresight,

how well I like it

as it is! The river shining,

the bare trees on the bank,

the house set snug

as a stone in the hill's flank,

the pasture behind it green.

Its songs and loves throb

in my head till like the wren

I sing—to what listens—again.

I part the out thrusting branches

and come in beneath

the blessed and the blessing trees.

Though I am silent

there is singing around me.

Though I am dark

there is vision around me.

Though I am heavy

there is flight around me.

Hunting them, a man must sweat, bear

the whine of a mosquito in his ear,

grow thirsty, tired, despair perhaps

of ever finding them, walk a long way.

He must give himself over to chance,

for they live beyond prediction.

He must give himself over to patience,

for they live beyond will. He must be led

along the hill as by a prayer.

If he finds them anywhere, he will find

a few, paired on their stalks,

at ease in the air as souls in bliss.

I found them here at first without hunting,

by grace, as all beauties are first found.

I have hunted and not found them here.

Found, unfound, they breathe their light

into the mind, year after year.

Life is your privilege, not your belonging.

It is the loss of it, now, that you will be singing.

In a dream I meet

my dead friend. He has,

I know, gone long and far,

and yet he is the same

for the dead are changeless.

They grow no older.

It is I who have changed,

grown strange to what I was.

Yet I, the changed one,

ask: “How you been?”

He grins and looks at me.

“I been eating peaches

off some mighty fine trees.”

Through the weeks of deep snow

we walked above the ground

on fallen sky, as though we did

not come of root and leaf, as though

we had only air and weather

for our difficult home.

But now

as March warms, and the rivulets

run like birdsong on the slopes,

and the branches of light sing in the hills,