New Collected Poems (23 page)

sheared bark from the hickory

that protected Uncle James.

It fled. The hectic pulse

died in the ground. The dust

thinned. Day returned,

as it seemed, after nightmare.

And there was Sam Adams

looking out of his tree

at Uncle James, who looked

back, his hat now tilted.

“My good boy, you must not

venture that again.”

And they walked southeast from there

two days, some thirty miles,

left a tomahawk and fish gig

at a fine spring, and marked

a gum sapling at that place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(This poem makes extensive borrowings

from various accounts of the McAfee

brothers' 1773 expedition into Kentucky.
)

for Donald Davie

The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.

Where the great slip gave way in the bank

and an acre disappeared, all human plans

dissolve. An aweful clarification occurs

where a place was. Its memory breaks

from what is known now, begins to drift.

Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness

widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.

As before the beginning, nothing is there.

Human wrong is in the cause, human

ruin in the effect—but no matter;

all will be lost, no matter the reason.

Nothing, having arrived, will stay.

The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon

passeth it away. And yet this nothing

is the seed of all—the clear eye

of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.

Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect

begins its struggle to return. The good gift

begins again to return. The good gift

begins again its descent. The maker moves

in the unmade, stirring the water until

it clouds, dark beneath the surface,

stirring and darkening the soul until pain

perceives new possibility. There is nothing

to do but learn and wait, return to work

on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.

Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

When I was a boy here,

traveling the fields for pleasure,

the farms were worked with teams.

As late as then a teamster

was thought an accomplished man,

his art an essential discipline.

A boy learned it by delight

as he learned to use

his body, following the example

of men. The reins of a team

were put into my hands

when I thought the work was play.

And in the corrective gaze

of men now dead I learned

to flesh my will in power

great enough to kill me

should I let it turn.

I learned the other tongue

by which men spoke to beasts

—all its terms and tones.

And by the time I learned,

new ways had changed the time.

The tractors came. The horses

stood in the fields, keepsakes,

grew old, and died. Or were sold

as dogmeat. Our minds received

the revolution of engines, our will

stretched toward the numb endurance

of metal. And that old speech

by which we magnified

our flesh in other flesh

fell dead in our mouths.

The songs of the world died

in our ears as we went within

the uproar of the long syllable

of the motors. Our intent entered

the world as combustion.

Like our travels, our workdays

burned upon the world,

lifting its inwards up

in fire. Veiled in that power

our minds gave up the endless

cycle of growth and decay

and took the unreturning way,

the breathless distance of iron.

But that work, empowered by burning

the world's body, showed us

finally the world's limits

and our own. We had then

the life of a candle, no longer

the ever-returning song

among the grassblades and the leaves.

Did I never forget?

Or did I, after years,

remember? To hear that song

again, though brokenly

in the distances of memory,

is coming home. I came to

a farm, some of it unreachable

by machines, as some of the world

will always be. And so

I came to a team, a pair

of mares—sorrels, with white

tails and manes, beautiful!—

to keep my sloping fields.

Going behind them, the reins

tight over their backs as they stepped

their long strides, revived

again on my tongue the cries

of dead men in the living

fields. Now every move

answers what is still.

This work of love rhymes

living and dead. A dance

is what this plodding is,

a song, whatever is said.

 

 

It needs a more refined perception to recognize throughout this stupendous wealth of varying shapes and forms the principle of stability. Yet this principle dominates. It dominates by means of an ever-recurring cycle . . . repeating itself silently and ceaselessly . . . . This cycle is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

An eastern religion calls this cycle the Wheel of Life and no better name could be given to it. The revolutions of this Wheel never falter and are perfect. Death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.

Sir Albert Howard,

The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture

 

 

OWEN FLOOD / JANUARY 13, 1920–MARCH 27,1974

We will see no more

the mown grass fallen behind him

on the still ridges before night,

or hear him laughing in the crop rows,

or know the order of his delight.

Though the green fields are my delight,

elegy is my fate. I have come to be

survivor of many and of much

that I love, that I won't live to see

come again into this world.

Things that mattered to me once

won't matter any more,

for I have left the safe shore

where magnificence of art

could suffice my heart.

In the day of his work

when the grace of the world

was upon him, he made his way,

not turning back or looking aside,

light in his stride.

Now may the grace of death

be upon him, his spirit blessed

in deep song of the world

and the stars turning, the seasons

returning, and long rest.

To be at home on its native ground

the mind must go down below its horizon,

descend below the lightfall

on ridge and steep and valley floor

to receive the lives of the dead. It must wake

in their sleep, who wake in its dreams.

“Who is here?” On the rock road between

creek and woods in the fall of the year,

I stood and listened. I heard the cries

of little birds high in the wind.

And then the beat of old footsteps

came around me, and my sight was changed.

I passed through the lens of darkness

as through a furrow, and the dead

gathered to meet me. They knew me,

but looked in wonder at the lines in my face,

the white hairs sprinkled on my head.

I saw a tall old man leaning

upon a cane, his open hand

raised in some fierce commendation,

knowledge of long labor in his eyes;

another, a gentler countenance,

smiling beneath a brim of sweaty felt

in welcome to me as before.

I saw an old woman, a saver

of little things, whose lonely grief

was the first I knew; and one bent

with age and pain, whose busy hands

worked out a selflessness of love.

Those were my teachers. And there were more,

beloved of face and name, who once bore

the substance of our common ground.

Their eyes, having grieved all grief, were clear.

I saw one standing aside, alone,

weariness in his shoulders, his eyes

bewildered yet with the newness

of his death. In my sorrow I felt,

as many times before, gladness

at the sight of him. “Owen,” I said.

He turned—lifted, tilted his hand.

I handed him a clod of earth

picked up in a certain well-known field.

He kneaded it in his palm and spoke:

“Wendell, this is not a place

for you and me.” And then he grinned;

we recognized his stubbornness—

it was his principle to doubt

all ease of satisfaction.

“The crops are in the barn,” I said,

“the morning frost has come to the fields,

and I have turned back to accept,

if I can, what none of us could prevent.”

He stood, remembering, weighing the cost

of the division we had come to,

his fingers resting on the earth

he held cupped lightly in his palm.

It seemed to me then that he cast off

his own confusion, and assumed

for one last time, in one last kindness,

the duty of the older man.

He nodded his head. “The desire I had

in early morning and in spring,

I never wore it out. I had

the desire, if I had had the strength.

But listen—what we prepared

to have, we have.”

He raised his eyes.

“Look,” he said.

We stood on a height,

woods above us, and below

on the half-mowed slope we saw ourselves

as we once were: a young man mowing,

a boy grubbing with an axe.

It was an old abandoned field,

long overgrown with thorns and briars.

We made it new in the heat haze

of that midsummer: he, proud

of the ground intelligence clarified,

and I, proud in his praise.

“I wish,” I said, “that we could be

back in that good time again.”

“We are back there again, today

and always. Where else would we be?”

He smiled, looked at me, and I knew

it was my mind he led me through.

He spoke of some infinitude

of thought.

He led me to another

slope beside another woods,

this lighted only by stars. Older

now, the man and the boy lay

on their backs in deep grass, quietly

talking. In the distance moved

the outcry of one deep-voiced hound.

Other voices joined that voice:

another place, a later time,

a hunter's fire among the trees,

faces turned to the blaze, laughter

and then silence, while in the dark

around us lay long breaths of sleep.

And then, one by one, he moved me

through all the fields of our lives,

preparations, plantings, harvests,

crews joking at the row ends,

the water jug passing like a kiss.

He spoke of our history passing through us,

the way our families' generations

overlap, the great teaching

coming down by deed of companionship:

characters of fields and times and men,

qualities of devotion and of work—

endless fascinations, passions

old as mind, new as light.

All our years around us, near us,

I saw him furious and narrow,

like most men, and saw the virtue

that made him unlike most.

It was his passion to be true

to the condition of the Fall—

to live by the sweat of his face, to eat

his bread, assured that cost was paid.

We came then to his time of pain,

when the early morning light showed,

as always, the sweet world, and all

an able, well-intentioned man

might do by dark, and his strength failed

before the light. His body had begun

too soon its earthward journey,

filling with gravity, and yet his mind

kept its old way.

Again, in the sun

of his last harvest, I heard him say:

“Do you want to take this row,

and let me get out of your way?”

I saw the world ahead of him then

for the first time, and I saw it

as he already had seen it,

himself gone from it. It was a sight

I could not see and not weep.

He reached and would have touched me

with his hand, though he could not.