New Collected Poems (11 page)

I love to lie down weary

under the stalk of sleep

growing slowly out of my head,

the dark leaves meshing.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

As I started home after dark

I looked into the sky and saw the new moon,

an old man with a basket on his arm.

He walked among the cedars in the bare woods.

They stood like guardians, dark

as he passed. He might have been singing,

or he might not. He might have been sowing

the spring flowers, or he might not. But I saw him

with his basket, going along the hilltop.

The fowls speak and sing, settling for the night.

The mare shifts in the bedding.

In her womb her foal sleeps and grows,

within and within and within. Her jaw grinds,

meditative in the fragrance of timothy.

Soon now my own rest will come.

The silent river flows on in the dusk, miles and miles.

Outside the walls and on the roof and in the woods

the cold rain falls.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

As spring begins the river rises,

filling like the sorrow of nations

—uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains,

the debris of kitchens, all passing

seaward. At dawn snow began to fall.

The ducks, moving north, pass

like shadows through the falling white.

The jonquils, half open, bend down with its weight.

The plow freezes in the furrow.

In the night I lay awake, thinking

of the river rising, the spring heavy

with official meaningless deaths.

To moralize the state, they drag out a man,

and bind his hands, and darken his eyes

with a black rag to be free of the light in them,

and tie him to a post, and kill him.

And I am sickened by complicity in my race.

To kill in hot savagery like a beast

is understandable. It is forgivable and curable.

But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath,

that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.

The serpent in gentle, compared to man.

It is man, the inventor of cold violence,

death as waste, who has made himself lonely

among the creatures, and set himself aside,

so that he cannot work in the sun with hope,

or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.

The morning's news drives sleep out of the head

at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes

open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake

in the agony of the old giving birth to the new

without assurance that the new will be better.

I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god's,

they are so open to the world.

I look at my sloping fields now turning

green with the young grass of April. What must I do

to go free? I think I must put on

a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die

rather than enter into the design of man's hate.

I will purge my mind of the airy claims

of church and state. I will serve the earth

and not pretend my life could better serve.

Another morning comes with its strange cure.

The earth is news. Though the river floods

and the spring is cold, my heart goes on,

faithful to a mystery in a cloud,

and the summer's garden continues its descent

through me, toward the ground.

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and of various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling

into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth. And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

The land is an ark, full of things waiting.

Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks

filling with water as the foot is raised.

The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands

become obscure in their use, prehistoric.

The mind passes over changed surfaces

like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs

and to the thought of swimming and wading birds.

Along the river croplands and gardens

are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark

and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch

holding the new nest of the hummingbird

the river flows heavy with earth, the water

turned the color of broken slopes. I stand

deep in the mud of the shore, a stake

planted to measure the rise, the water rising,

the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood

passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots

drag the bottom. I was not ready for this

parting, my native land putting out to sea.

What must a man do to be at home in the world?

There must be times when he is here

as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven shadows

of the grass and the flighty darknesses

of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond

the sense of the weariness of engines and of his own heart,

his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him

as though his bones fade beyond thought

into the shadows that grow out of the ground

so that the furrow he opens in the earth opens

in his bones, and he hears the silence

of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here

a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up

before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind

rain! What songs he will hear!

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,

tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses

are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill

dark floodwater moves down the river.

The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.

I have climbed up to water the horses

and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,

letting the day gather and pass. Below me

cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,

slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world

men are making plans, wearing themselves out,

spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

On the housetop, the floor of the boundless

where birds and storms fly and disappear,

and the valley opened over our heads, a leap

of clarity between the hills, we bent five days

in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on

the new, letting the sun touch for once

in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then

securing the house again in its shelter and shade.

Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history

has come between me and the sky.

His memories lived in the place

like fingers locked in the rock ledges

like roots. When he died

and his influence entered the air

I said, Let my mind be the earth

of his thought, let his kindness

go ahead of me. Though I do not escape

the history barbed in my flesh,

certain wise movements of his hands,

the turns of his speech

keep with me. His hope of peace

keeps with me in harsh days,

the shell of his breath dimming away

three summers in the earth.

The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight

in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness

of the grass, fathomless, the long blades

rising out of the well of time. Cars

travel the valley roads below me, their lights

finding the dark, and racing on. Above

their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard,

and felt the country turn under the stars

toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here

between the bright silent thousands of stars

and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.

The hill has grown to me like a foot.

Until I lift the earth I cannot move.

The seeds begin abstract as their species,

remote as the name on the sack

they are carried home in: Fayette Seed Company

Corner of Vine and Rose. But the sower

going forth to sow sets foot

into time to come, the seeds falling

on his own place. He has prepared a way

for his life to come to him, if it will.

Like a tree, he has given roots

to the earth, and stands free.