New Collected Poems (10 page)

sycamore,

or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the

walnut,

nor has the elm bowed before the monuments or sworn the oath

of allegiance.

They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.

In the thought of you I imagine myself free of the weapons and

the official hates that I have borne on my back like a

hump,

and in the thought of myself I imagine you free of weapons and

official hates,

so that if we should meet we would not go by each other

looking at the ground like slaves sullen under their

burdens,

but would stand clear in the gaze of each other.

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with

you in silence beside the forest pool.

There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose

hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who

dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.

There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he

comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.

Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches

on every side, there is no other place

to turn. Dawning in your veins

is the light of the blast

that will print your shadow on stone

in a last antic of despair

to survive you in the dark.

Man has put his history to sleep

in the engine of doom. It flies

over his dreams in the night,

a blazing cocoon. O gaze into the fire

and be consumed with man's despair,

and be still, and wait. And then see

the world go on with the patient work

of seasons, embroidering birdsong

upon itself as for a wedding, and feel

your heart set out in the morning

like a young traveler, arguing the world

from the kiss of a pretty girl.

It is the time's discipline to think

of the death of all living, and yet live.

I have been spared another day

to come into this night

as though there is a mercy in things

mindful of me. Love, cast all

thought aside. I cast aside

all thought. Our bodies enter

their brief precedence,

surrounded by their sleep.

Through you I rise, and you

through me, into the joy

we make, but may not keep.

Love, all day there has been at the edge of my mind

the wish that my life would hurry on,

my days pass quickly and be done,

for I felt myself a man carrying a loose tottering bundle

along a narrow scaffold: if I could carry it

fast enough, I could hold it together to the end.

Now, leaving my perplexity and haste,

I come within the boundaries of your life, an interior

clear and calm. You could not admit me burdened.

I approach you clean as a child of all that has been with me.

You speak to me in the dark tongue of my joy

that you do not know. In you I know

the deep leisure of the filling moon. May I live long.

 

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,

to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

descending in the dark?

I owned a slope full of stones.

Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,

shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks

where the earth caught and kept them

dark, an old music mute in them

that my head keeps now I have dug them out.

I broke them where they slugged in their dark

cells, and lifted them up in pieces.

As I piled them in the light

I began their music. I heard their old lime

rouse in breath of song that has not left me.

I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.

What bond have I made with the earth,

having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing

I have carried with me out of that day.

The stones have given me music

that figures for me their holes in the earth

and their long lying in them dark.

They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,

and I must prepare a fitting silence.

Where the road came, no longer bearing men,

but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,

the house fell to ruin, and only the old wife's daffodils

rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic

and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle

with white bloom. For a while in the years of its wilderness

a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there

in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire

to the remnants of house and shed, and let time

hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all

would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste

like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed

then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me

something that would not bear my name—something that

bears us

through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

In the stilled place that once was a road going down

from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

history's death upon the place and the trees that would

have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

The hand is risen from the earth,

the sap risen, leaf come back to branch,

bird to nest crotch. Beans lift

their heads up in the row. The known

returns to be known again. Going

and coming back, it forms its curves,

a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.

I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,

their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,

the bones imprisoned under them.

Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!

Pry open the vaults and the coffins

so the dead may nourish their graves

and go free, their acres traversed all summer

by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.

To know the inhabiting reasons

of trees and streams, old men

who shed their lives

on the world like leaves,

I watch them go.

And I go. I build

the place of my leaving.

The days arc into vision

like fish leaping, their shining

caught in the stream.

I watch them go

in homage and sorrow.

I build the place of my dream.

I build the place of my leaving

that the dark may come clean.

In a country without saints or shrines

I know one who made his pilgrimage

to springs, where in his life's dry years

his mind held on. Everlasting,

people called them, and gave them names.

The water broke into sounds and shinings

at the vein mouth, bearing the taste

of the place, the deep rock, sweetness

out of the dark. He bent and drank

in bondage to the ground.

It is a day of the earth's renewing without any man's doing or

help.

Though I have fields I do not go out to work in them.

Though I have crops standing in rows I do not go out

to look at them or gather what has ripened or hoe the weeds

from the balks.

Though I have animals I stay dry in the house while they graze

in the wet.

Though I have buildings they stand closed under their roofs.

Though I have fences they go without me.

My life stands in place, covered, like a hayrick or a mushroom.