New Collected Poems (26 page)

In Memory: Harlan and Anna Hubbard

 

 

 

Spell the spiel of cause and effect,

Ride the long rail of fact after fact;

What curled the plume in the drake's tail

And put the white ring around his neck?

In January cold, the year's short light,

We make new marriage here;

The day is clear, the ground is bridal white,

Songless the brittled air

As we come through the snow to praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

In time's short light, and less than light, we pray

That odds be thus made evens,

And earthly love in its uncertain way

Be reconciled with Heaven's.

Before the early dark, we praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

Now let her honest, honored bridegroom come,

All other choice foregone,

To make his vows and claim and take her home,

Their two lives made in one.

He comes now through the snow to praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

All preparation past, and rightly glad,

She makes her pledge for good

Against all possibility of bad,

Begins her womanhood,

And as she walks the snow, we praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

Now, as her parents, we must stand aside,

For what we owed we've paid her

In far from perfect truth and love—this bride

Is more than we have made her,

And so we come in snow to praise

Our Mary in her day of days.

January 10, 1981

Until I have appeased the itch

To be a millionaire,

Spare us, O Lord, relent and spare;

Don't end the world till it has made me rich.

It ends in poverty.

O Lord, until I come to fame

I pray Thee, keep the peace;

Allay all strife, let rancor cease

Until my book may earn its due acclaim.

It ends in strife, unknown.

Since I have promised wealth to all,

Bless our economy;

Preserve our incivility

And greed until the votes are cast this fall.

Unknown, it ends in ruin.

Favor the world, Lord, with Thy love;

Spare us for what we're not.

I fear Thy wrath, and Hell is hot;

Don't blow Thy trumpet until I improve.

Worlds blaze; the trumpet sounds.

O Lord, despite our right and wrong,

Let Thy daylight come down

Again on woods and field and town,

To be our daily bread and daily song.

It lives in bread and song.

My old friend tell us how the country changed:

where the grist mill was on Cane Run,

now gone; where the peach orchard was,

gone too; where the Springport Road was, gone

beneath returning trees; how the creek ran three weeks

after a good rain, long ago, no more;

how when these hillsides first were plowed, the soil

was black and deep, no stones, and that was long ago;

where the wild turkeys roosted in the old days;

“You'd have to know this country mighty well

before I could tell you where.”

And my young friend says: “Have him speak this

into a recorder. It is precious. It should be saved.”

I know the panic of that wish to save

the vital knowledge of the old times, handed down,

for it is rising off the earth, fraying away

in the wind and the coming day.

As the machines come and the people go

the old names rise, chattering, and depart.

But knowledge of my own going into old time

tells me no. Because it must be saved,

do not tell it to a machine to save it.

That old man speaking you have heard

since your boyhood, since his prime, his voice

speaking out of lives long dead, their minds

speaking in his own, by winter fires, in fields and woods,

in barns while rain beat on the roofs

and wind shook the girders. Stay and listen

until he dies or you die, for death

is in this, and grief is in it. Live here

as one who knows these things. Stay, if you live;

listen and answer. Listen to the next one

like him, if there is to be one. Be

the next one like him, if you must;

stay and wait. Tell your children. Tell them

to tell their children. As you depart

toward the coming light, turn back

and speak, as the creek steps downward

over the rocks, saying the same changing thing

in the same place as it goes.

When the record is made, the unchanging

word carried to a safe place

in a time not here, the assemblage

of minds dead and living, the loved lineage

dispersed, silent, turned away, the dead

dead at last, it will be too late.

From many hard workdays in the fields,

many passages through the woods,

many mornings on the river, lifting

hooked lines out of the dark,

from many nightfalls, many dawns,

on the ridgetops and the creek road,

as upright as a tree, as freely standing,

Arthur Rowanberry comes in his old age

into the care of doctors, into the prison

of technical mercy, disease

and hectic skill making their way

into his body, hungry invaders fighting

for claims in that dark homeland,

strangers touching him, calling his name,

and so he lies down at last

in a bare room far from home.

And we who know him come

from the places he knew us in, and stand

by his bed, and speak. He smiles

and greets us from another time.

We stand around him like a grove,

a moment's shelter, old neighborhood

remade in that alien place. But the time

we stand in is not his time.

He is off in the places of his life,

now only places in his mind,

doing what he did in them when they were

the world's places, and he the world's man:

cutting the winter wood, piling the brush,

fixing the fences, mending the roofs,

caring for the crops under the long sun,

loading up the wagon, heading home.

Must another poor body, brought

to its rest at last, be made the occasion

of yet another sermon? Have we nothing

to say of the dead that is not

a dull mortal lesson to the living,

our praise of Heaven blunted

by this craven blaming of the earth?

We must go with the body to the dark

grave, and there at the edge turn back

together—it is all that we can do—remembering

her as she is now in our minds

forever: how she gathered the chicks

into her apron before the storm, and tossed

the turkey hen over the fence,

so that the little ones followed,

peeping, out of the tall grass, safe

from the lurking snake; how she was one

of us, here with us, who is now gone.

When I was a young man,

grown up at last, how large

I seemed to myself! I was a tree,

tall already, and what I had not

yet reached, I would yet grow

to reach. Now, thirty more years

added on, I have reached much

I did not expect, in a direction

unexpected. I am growing downward,

smaller, one among the grasses.

Sometimes hidden from me

in daily custom and in trust,

so that I live by you unaware

as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,

a wild rose blooming at the edge

of thicket, grace and light

where yesterday was only shade,

and once more I am blessed, choosing

again what I chose before.

How joyful to be together, alone

as when we first were joined

in our little house by the river

long ago, except that now we know

each other, as we did not then;

and now instead of two stories fumbling

to meet, we belong to one story

that the two, joining, made. And now

we touch each other with the tenderness

of mortals, who know themselves:

how joyful to feel the heart quake

at the sight of a grandmother,

old friend in the morning light,

beautiful in her blue robe!

I knew her when I saw her

in the vision of Botticelli, riding

shoreward out of the waves,

and afterward she was in my mind

as she had been before, but changed,

so that if I saw her here, near

nightfall, striding off the gleam

of the Kentucky River as it darkened

behind her, the willows touching

her with little touches laid

on breast and arm and thigh, I

would rise as after a thousand

years, as out of the dark grave,

alight, shaken, to remember her.

The poem is important, but

not more than the people

whose survival it serves,

one of the necessities, so they may

speak what is true, and have

the patience for beauty: the weighted

grainfield, the shady street,

the well-laid stone and the changing tree

whose branches spread above.

For want of songs and stories

they have dug away the soil,

paved over what is left,

set up their perfunctory walls

in tribute to no god,

for the love of no man or woman,

so that the good that was here

cannot be called back

except by long waiting, by great

sorrow remembered and to come,

by invoking the understones

of the world, and the vivid air.

The poem is important,

as the want of it

proves. It is the stewardship

of its own possibility,

the past remembering itself

in the presence of

the present, the power learned

and handed down to see

what is present

and what is not: the pavement

laid down and walked over

regardlessly—by exiles, here

only because they are passing.

Oh, remember the oaks that were

here, the leaves, purple and brown,

falling, the nuthatches walking

headfirst down the trunks,

crying
“onc! onc!”
in the brightness

as they are doing now

in the cemetery across the street

where the past and the dead

keep each other. To remember,

to hear and remember, is to stop

and walk on again

to a livelier, surer measure.

It is dangerous

to remember the past only

for its own sake, dangerous

to deliver a message

that you did not get.

I was your rebellious son,

do you remember? Sometimes

I wonder if you do remember,

so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been

I wonder sometimes if it did not

precede my wrong, and I erred,

safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,

or my bed at night, so that almost

I should forgive you, who perhaps

foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,

causing me to smile now, looking back,

to see how paltry was my worst,

compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,

is the vision of that Heaven of which

we have heard, where those who love

each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,

the light a music in the air,

and all is unentangled,

and all is undismayed.

 

I never have denied

What faith and scripture tell,

That Heaven's host is glad,

Or that there's pain in Hell.

But what I haven't tried

I'll not put up for sale.

No man has ever died

And lived to tell the tale.

A people in the throes of national prosperity, who

breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat

poisoned food,

who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons

that they breathe, drink, and eat,