New Collected Poems (12 page)

All that I serve will die, all my delights,

the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,

the silent lilies standing in the woods,

the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all

will burn in man's evil, or dwindle

in its own age. Let the world bring on me

the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know

my little light taken from me into the seed

of the beginning and the end, so I may bow

to mystery, and take my stand on the earth

like a tree in a field, passing without haste

or regret toward what will be, my life

a patient willing descent into the grass.

From my wife and household and fields

that I have so carefully come to in my time

I enter the craziness of travel,

the reckless elements of air and fire.

Having risen up from my native land,

I find myself smiled at by beautiful women,

making me long for a whole life

to devote to each one, making love to her

in some house, in some way of sleeping

and waking I would make only for her.

And all over the country I find myself

falling in love with houses, woods, and farms

that I will never set foot in.

My eyes go wandering through America,

two wayfaring brothers, resting in silence

against the forbidden gates. O what if

an angel came to me, and said,

“Go free of what you have done. Take

what you want.” The atoms of blood

and brain and bone strain apart

at the thought. What I am is the way home.

Like rest after a sleepless night,

my old love comes on me in midair.

Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found

the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,

frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air

held or moved them as it stood or moved.

The ground that slept beneath us woke in them

and made a music of the light, as it had waked

and sung in fragile things unnumbered years,

and left their kind no less symmetrical and fair

for all that time. Does my land have the health

of this, where nothing falls but into life?

for Gene Meatyard

Between painting a roof yesterday and the hay

harvest tomorrow, a holiday in the woods

under the grooved trunks and branches, the roof

of leaves lighted and shadowed by the sky.

As America from England, the woods stands free

from politics and anthems. So in the woods I stand

free, knowing my land. My country, ‘tis of the

drying pools along Camp Branch I sing

where the water striders walk like Christ,

all sons of God, and of the woods grown old

on the stony hill where the thrush's song rises

in the light like a curling vine and the bobwhite's

whistle opens in the air, broad and pointed as a leaf.

Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse
;

Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal . . .

However just and anxious I have been,

I will stop and step back

from the crowd of those who may agree

with what I say, and be apart.

There is no earthly promise of life or peace

but where the roots branch and weave

their patient silent passages in the dark;

uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.

I am not bound for any public place,

but for ground of my own

where I have planted vines and orchard trees,

and in the heat of the day climbed up

into the healing shadow of the woods.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn

and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

I began to be followed by a voice saying:

“It can't last. It can't last.

Harden yourself. Harden yourself.

Be ready. Be ready.”

“Go look under the leaves,”

it said, “for what is living there

is long dead in your tongue.”

And it said, “Put your hands

into the earth. Live close

to the ground. Learn the darkness.

Gather round you all

the things that you love, name

their names, prepare

to lose them. It will be

as if all you know were turned

around within your body.”

And I went and put my hands

into the ground, and they took root

and grew into a season's harvest.

I looked behind the veil

of the leaves, and heard voices

that I knew had been dead

in my tongue years before my birth.

I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me.

Waking in the early mornings,

I could hear it, like a bird

bemused among the leaves,

a mockingbird idly singing

in the autumn of catastrophe:

“Be ready. Be ready.

Harden yourself. Harden yourself.”

And I heard the sound

of a great engine pounding

in the air, and a voice asking:

“Change or slavery?

Hardship or slavery?”

and voices answering:

“Slavery! Slavery!”

And I was afraid, loving

what I knew would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:

“You have not yet come close enough.

Come nearer the ground. Learn

from the woodcock in the woods

whose feathering is a ritual

of the fallen leaves,

and from the nesting quail

whose speckling makes her hard to see

in the long grass.

Study the coat of the mole.

For the farmer shall wear

the furrows and the greenery

of his fields, and bear

the long standing of the woods.”

And I asked: “You mean death, then?”

“Yes,” the voice said. “Die

into what the earth requires of you.”

I let go all holds then, and sank

like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,

and at last came fully into the ease

and the joy of that place,

all my lost ones returning.

9/28/68

Having once put his hand into the ground,

seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,

a man has made a marriage with his place,

and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.

His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.

It has reached into the dark like a root

and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness,

a flickering sap coursing upward into his head

so that he sees the old tribespeople bend

in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening

to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,

their lodges and graves, and closing again.

He is made their descendant, what they left

in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.

And he sees the bearers of his own blood arriving,

the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,

their hands gathering the stones up into walls,

and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground

to lie still under the black wheels of machines.

The current flowing to him through the earth

flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,

a young man who has reached into the ground,

his hand held in the dark as by a hand.

being a fragment

of the natural history of New Eden,

in homage

to Mr. Ed McClanahan, one of the locals

The mad farmer, the thirsty one,

went dry. When he had time

he threw a visionary high

lonesome on the holy communion wine.

“It is an awesome event

when an earthen man has drunk

his fill of the blood of a god,”

people said, and got out of his way.

He plowed the churchyard, the

minister's wife, three graveyards

and a golf course. In a parking lot

he planted a forest of little pines.

He sanctified the groves,

dancing at night in the oak shades

with goddesses. He led

a field of corn to creep up

and tassel like an Indian tribe

on the courthouse lawn. Pumpkins

ran out to the ends of their vines

to follow him. Ripe plums

and peaches reached into his pockets.

Flowers sprang up in his tracks

everywhere he stepped. And then

his planter's eye fell on

that parson's fair fine lady

again. “O holy plowman,” cried she,

“I am all grown up in weeds.

Pray, bring me back into good tilth.”

He tilled her carefully

and laid her by, and she

did bring forth others of her kind,

and others, and some more.

They sowed and reaped till all

the countryside was filled

with farmers and their brides sowing

and reaping. When they died

they became two spirits of the woods.

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my

inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission

to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.

I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,

and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,

and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,

in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught

so often laughing at funerals, that was because

I knew the dead were already slipping away,

preparing a comeback, and can I help it?

And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed

my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom

had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not

be resurrected by a piece of cake. “Dance,” they told me,

and I stood still, and while they stood

quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.

“Pray,” they said, and I laughed, covering myself

in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray

into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.

When they said, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,”

I told them, “He's dead.” And when they told me,

“God is dead,” I answered, “He goes fishing every day

in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.”

When they asked me would I like to contribute

I said no, and when they had collected

more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.

When they asked me to join them I wouldn't,

and then went off by myself and did more

than they would have asked. “Well, then,” they said,

“go and organize the International Brotherhood

of Contraries,” and I said, “Did you finish killing

everybody who was against peace?” So be it.

Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest

way to come to the truth. It is one way.

The sea always arriving,

hissing in pebbles, is breaking

its edge where the landsman

squats on his rock. The dark

of the earth is familiar to him,

close mystery of his source

and end, always flowering

in the light and always

fading. But the dark of the sea

is perfect and strange,

the absence of any place,

immensity on the loose.

Still, he sees it is another

keeper of the land, caretaker,

shaking the earth, breaking it,

clicking the pieces, but somewhere

holding deep fields yet to rise,

shedding its richness on them

silently as snow, keeper and maker

of places wholly dark. And in him

something dark applauds.

In this woman the earth speaks.

Her words open in me, cells of light

flashing in my body, and make a song

that I follow toward her out of my need.

The pain I have given her I wear

like another skin, tender, the air

around me flashing with thorns.

And yet such joy as I have given her

sings in me and is part of her song.

The winds of her knees shake me

like a flame. I have risen up from her,

time and again, a new man.

“. . . a field woman is a portion

of the field; she has somehow lost