New Collected Poems (9 page)

like a cameo.

For a night and a day

his friend stayed here

on his way across the continent.

In the afternoon they walked

down from Port Royal

to the river, following

for a while the fall of Camp Branch

through the woods,

then crossing the ridge

and entering the woods again

on the valley rim. They talked

of history—men who saw visions

of crops where the woods stood

and stand again, the crops

gone. They ate the cold apples

they carried in their pockets.

They lay on a log in the sun

to rest, looking up

through bare branches at the sky.

They saw a nuthatch walk

in a loop on the side of a tree

in a late patch of light

while below them the
Lexington

shoved sand up the river,

her diesels shaking the air.

They walked along trees

across ravines. Now his friend

is back on the highway, and he sits again

at his window. Another day.

During the night snow fell.

The window grows fragile

in a time of war.

The man seated beneath it

feels its glass turn deadly.

He feels the nakedness

of his face and throat.

Its shards and splinters balance

in transparence, delicately

seamed. In the violence

of men against men, it will not last.

In any mind turned away

in hate, it will go blind,

Men spare one another

by will. When there is hate

it is joyous to kill. And he

has borne the hunger to destroy,

riding anger like a captain,

savage, exalted and blind.

There is war in his veins

like a loud song.

He has known his heart to rise

in glad holocaust against his kind,

and felt hard in thigh and arm

the thew of fury.

Peace. May he waken

not too late from his wraths

to find his window still

clear in its wall, and the world

there. Within things

there is peace, and at the end

of things. It is the mind

turned away from the world

that turns against it.

The armed presidents stand

on deadly islands in the air,

overshadowing the crops.

Peace. Let men, who cannot be brothers

to themselves, be brothers

to mulleins and daisies

that have learned to live on the earth.

Let them understand the pride

of sycamores and thrushes

that receive the light gladly, and do not

think to illuminate themselves.

Let them know that the foxes and the owls

are joyous in their lives,

and their gayety is praise to the heavens,

and they do not raven with their minds.

In the night the devourer,

and in the morning all things

find the light a comfort.

Peace. The earth turns

against all living, in the end.

And when mind has not outraged

itself against its nature,

they die and become the place

they lived in. Peace to the bones

that walk in the sun toward death,

for they will come to it soon enough.

Let the phoebes return in spring

and build their nest of moss

in the porch rafters,

and in autumn let them depart.

Let the garden be planted,

and let the frost come.

Peace to the porch and the garden.

Peace to the man in the window.

In the early morning dark

he dreamed of the spring woodsflowers

standing in the ground,

dark yet under the leaves and under

the bare cold branches.

But in his dream he knew their way

was prepared, and in their time

they would rise up joyful.

And though he had dreamed earlier

of strife, his sleep became peaceful.

He said: If we, who have killed

our brothers and hated ourselves,

are made in the image of God,

then surely the bloodroot,

wild phlox, trillium and mayapple

are more truly made

in God's image, for they have desired

to be no more than they are,

and they have spared each other.

Their future

is undiminished by their past.

Let me, he said in his dream,

become always less a soldier

and more a man,

for what is unopened in the ground

is pledged to peace.

When he woke and went out

a flock of wild ducks that had fed

on the river while he slept

flew off in fear of him.

And he walked, manly, into the new day.

He came to his window

where he sat and looked out,

the earth before him, blessed

by his dream of peace,

bad history behind him.

He has known a tunnel

through the falling snow

that brought him back at dark

and nearly killed him on the way,

the road white as the sky

and the snow piling.

Mortality crept up close

in the darkness round his eyes.

He felt his death's wrenched avatars

lying like silent animals

along the ditch. He thought

of his wife, his supper and his bed,

and kept on, and made it.

Now he sits at the window

again, the country hard and bright

in this winter's coldest morning.

The river, unfrozen still,

gives off a breath of smoke

that flows upstream with the wind.

Behind him that burrow

along the wild road

grows certain in his mind,

leading here, surely. It has arrived

at the window, and is clarified.

Now he has learned another way

he can come here. Luck

taught him, and desire.

The snow lies under the woods

and February is ending.

Far off, another way, he hears

the flute of spring,

an old-style traveler,

wandering through the trees.

Still sleeping, he heard

the phoebe call, and woke to it,

and winter passed out of his mind.

The bird, in the high branches

above the road-culvert mouth,

sang to what was sleeping,

two notes, clear and

harsh. The stream came,

full-voiced, down the rocks

out of the woods. The wood ducks

have come back to nest

in the old hollow sycamore.

The window has changed, no longer

remembering, but waiting.

He stood on the ground

and saw his wife borne away

in the air, and suddenly

knew her. It is not the sky

he trusts her to, or her flight,

but to herself as he saw her

turn back and smile. And he

turned back to the buried garden

where the spring flood rose.

The window is made strange

by these days he has come to.

She is the comfort of the rooms

she leaves behind her.

His love returns

and walks among the trees,

a new time lying beneath

the leaves at her feet.

There are songs in the ground

audible to her. She enters

the dark globe of sleep,

waking the tree frogs

whose songs star the silence

in constellations. She wakens

the birds of mornings. The sun

makes a low gentle piping.

The bloodroot rises in its folded

leaf, and there is a tensing

in the woods. There is

no window where she is.

All is clear where the light begins

to dress the branch in green.

The bloodroot is white

in the woods, and men renew

their abuse of the world

and each other. Abroad

we burn and maim

in the name of principles

we no longer recognize in acts.

At home our flayed land

flows endlessly

to burial in the sea.

When mortality is not heavy

on us, humanity is—

public meaninglessness

preying on private meaning.

As the weather warms, the driven

swarm into the river,

pursued by whining engines,

missing the world

as they pass over it,

every man

his own mosquito.

In the heron's eye

is one of the dies of change.

Another

is in the sun.

Each thing is carried

beyond itself.

The man of the window

lives at the edge,

knowing the approach

of what must be, joy

and dread.

Now the old sycamore

yields at its crown

a dead branch.

It will sink like evening

into its standing place.

The young trees rise,

and the dew is on them,

and the heat of the day

is on them, and the dark

—end and beginning

without end.

Now that April with sweet rain

has come to Port William again,

Burley Coulter rows out

on the river to fish.

He sits all day in his boat,

tied to a willow, his hat

among green branches,

his dark line curving

in the wind. He is one

with the sun.

The current's horses graze

in the shade along the banks.

The watcher leaves his window

and goes out.

He sits in the woods, watched

by more than he sees.

What is his is

past. He has come

to a rootless place

and a windowless.

There is a wild light

his mind loses

until the spring renews,

but it holds his mind

and will not let it rest.

The window is a fragment

of the world suspended

in the world, the known

adrift in mystery.

And now the green

rises. The window has an edge

that is celestial,

where the eyes are surpassed.

(after looking at some pictures in a magazine)

You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper,

listening to your daughter play the accordion. You smile

with the pleasure of a man confident in his hands, resting

after a day of long labor in the forest, the cry of the saw

in your head, and the vision of coming home to rest.

Your daughter's face is clear in the joy of hearing

her own music. Her fingers live on the keys

like people familiar with the land they were born in.

You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son,

tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams.

Over you, as your hands work, is the dream of the still pools.

Over you is the dream

of your silence while the east brightens, birds waking close by

you in the trees.

I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn,

your son in your tracks.

You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest

whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound

of your own voice

or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to

speak,

and soon the voice of the stream rises ahead of you, and you

take the path beside it.

I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over

you

as you come to the pool where you will fish, and of the mist

drifting

over the water, and of the cast fly resting light on the face of the

pool.

And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself

in the world. I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy

and slow along the feet of the trees. I hear the voices of the wren

and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the

windows

and over the roof. In my house my daughter learns the

womanhood

of her mother. My son is at play, pretending to be

the man he believes I am. I am the outbreathing of this ground.

My words are its words as the wren's song is its song.

Who has invented our enmity? Who has prescribed us

hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other

with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger

that I should desire the burning of your house or the

destruction of your children?

Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the

thought

that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and

rivers, and the silence of birds?

Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange

to you, and the voices of your land strange to me?

Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to

destroy you,

or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has

imagined

that your death could be negligible to me now that I have seen

these pictures of your face?

Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,

or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with

you in the forest?

And now one of the ideas of my place will be that you would

gladly talk and visit and work with me.

I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in.

As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as

carefully as they hold to it.

I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the