New Collected Poems (13 page)

her own margin . . .”
THOMAS HARDY

As my first blow against it, I would not stay.

As my second, I learned to live without it.

As my third, I went back one day and saw

that my departure had left a little hole

where some of its strength was flowing out,

and I heard the earth singing beneath the street.

Singing quietly myself, I followed the song

among the traffic. Everywhere I went, singing,

following the song, the stones cracked,

and I heard it stronger. I heard it strongest

in the presence of women. There was one I met

who had the music of the ground in her, and she

was its dancer. “O Exile,” I sang, “for want of you

there is a tree that has borne no leaves

and a planting season that will not turn warm.”

Looking at her, I felt a tightening of roots

under the pavement, and I turned and went

with her a little way, dancing beside her.

And I saw a black woman still inhabiting

as in a dream the space of the open fields

where she had bent to plant and gather. She stood

rooted in the music I heard, pliant and proud

as a stalk of wheat with the grain heavy. No man

with the city thrusting angles in his brain

is equal to her. To reach her he must tear it down.

Wherever lovely women are the city is undone,

its geometry broken in pieces and lifted,

its streets and corners fading like mist at sunrise

above groves and meadows and planted fields.

They were into the lambing, up late.

Talking and smoking around their lantern,

they squatted in the barn door, left open

so the quiet of the winter night

diminished what they said. The chill

had begun to sink into their clothes.

Now and then they raised their hands

to breathe on them. The youngest one

yawned and shivered.

“Damn,” he said,

“I'd like to be asleep. I'd like to be

curled up in a warm nest like an old

groundhog, and sleep till spring.”

“When I was your age, Billy, it wasn't

sleep I thought about,” Uncle Stanley said.

“Last few years here I've took to sleeping.”

And Raymond said: “To sleep till spring

you'd have to have a trust in things

the way animals do. Been a long time,

I reckon, since people felt safe enough

to sleep more than a night. You might

wake up someplace you didn't go to sleep at.”

They hushed a while, as if to let the dark

brood on what they had said. Behind them

a sheep stirred in the bedding and coughed.

It was getting close to midnight.

Later they would move back along the row

of penned ewes, making sure the newborn

lambs were well dried, and had sucked,

and then they would go home cold to bed.

The barn stood between the ridgetop

and the woods along the bluff. Below

was the valley floor and the river

they could not see. They could hear

the wind dragging its underside

through the bare branches of the woods.

And suddenly the wind began to carry

a low singing. They looked across

the lantern at each other's eyes

and saw they all had heard. They stood,

their huge shadows rising up around them.

The night had changed. They were already

on their way—dry leaves underfoot

and mud under the leaves—to another barn

on down along the woods' edge,

an old stripping room, where by the light

of the open stove door they saw the man,

and then the woman and the child

lying on a bed of straw on the dirt floor.

“Well, look a there,” the old man said.

“First time this ever happened here.”

And Billy, looking, and looking away,

said: “Howdy. Howdy. Bad night.”

And Raymond said: “There's a first

time, they say, for everything.”

And that

he thought, was as reassuring as anything

was likely to be, and as he needed it to be.

They did what they could. Not much.

They brought a piece of rug and some sacks

to ease the hard bed a little, and one

wedged three dollar bills into a crack

in the wall in a noticeable place.

And they stayed on, looking, looking away,

until finally the man said they were well

enough off, and should be left alone.

They went back to their sheep. For a while

longer they squatted by their lantern

and talked, tired, wanting sleep, yet stirred

by wonder—old Stanley too, though he would not

say so.

“Don't make no difference,” he said.

“They'll have ‘em anywhere. Looks like a man

would have a right to be born in bed, if not

die there, but he don't.”

“But you heard

that singing in the wind,” Billy said.

“What about that?”

“Ghosts. They do that way.”

“Not that way.”

“Scared him, it did.”

The old man laughed. “We'll have to hold

his damn hand for him, and lead him home.”

“It don't even bother you,” Billy said.

“You go right on just the same. But you heard.”

“Now that I'm old I sleep in the dark.

That ain't what I used to do in it. I heard

something.”

“You heard a good deal more

than you'll understand,” Raymond said,

“or him or me either.”

They looked at him.

He had, they knew, a talent for unreasonable

belief. He could believe in tomorrow

before it became today—a human enough

failing, and they were tolerant.

He said:

“It's the old ground trying it again.

Solstice, seeding and birth—it never

gets enough. It wants the birth of a man

to bring together sky and earth, like a stalk

of corn. It's not death that makes the dead

rise out of the ground, but something alive

straining up, rooted in darkness, like a vine.

That's what you heard. If you're in the right mind

when it happens, it can come on you strong;

you might hear music passing on the wind,

or see a light where there wasn't one before.”

“Well, how do you know if it amounts to anything?”

“You don't. It usually don't. It would take

a long time to ever know.”

But that night

and other nights afterwards, up late,

there was a feeling in them—familiar

to them, but always startling in its strength—

like the thought, on a winter night,

of the lambing ewes dry-bedded and fed,

and the thought of the wild creatures warm

asleep in their nests, deep underground.

Late in the night I pay

the unrest I owe

to the life that has never lived

and cannot live now.

What the world could be

is my good dream

and my agony when, dreaming it,

I lie awake and turn

and look into the dark.

I think of a luxury

in the sturdiness and grace

of necessary things, not

in frivolity. That would heal

the earth, and heal men.

But the end, too, is part

of the pattern, the last

labor of the heart:

to learn to lie still,

one with the earth

again, and let the world go.

for James Baker Hall

It is presumptuous and irresponsible to pray for other people. A good man would pray only for himself—that he have as much good as he deserves, that he not receive more good or more evil than he deserves, that he bother nobody, that he not be bothered, that he want less. Praying thus for himself, he should prepare to live with the consequences.

At night make me one with the darkness.

In the morning make me one with the light.

If a man finds it necessary to eat garbage, he should resist the temptation to call it a delicacy.

Don't pray for the rain to stop.

Pray for good luck fishing

when the river floods.

Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.

Beware of the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

Put your hands into the mire.

They will learn the kinship

of the shaped and the unshapen,

the living and the dead.

When I rise up

let me rise up joyful

like a bird.

When I fall

let me fall without regret

like a leaf.

Sowing the seed,

my hand is one with the earth.

Wanting the seed to grow,

my mind is one with the light.

Hoeing the crop,

my hands are one with the rain.

Having cared for the plants,

my mind is one with the air.

Hungry and trusting,

my mind is one with the earth.

Eating the fruit,

my body is one with the earth.

Let my marriage by brought to the ground.

Let my love for this woman enrich the earth.

What is its happiness but preparing its place?

What is its monument but a rich field?

By the excellence of his work the workman is a neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise to own the salesman is a neighbor.

By selling what is good his character survives his market.

Let me wake in the night

and hear it raining

and go back to sleep.

Don't worry and fret about the crops. After you have done all you can for them, let them stand in the weather on their own.

If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.

But the
real
products of any year's work are the farmer's mind and the cropland itself.

If he raises a good crop at the cost of belittling himself and diminishing the ground, he has gained nothing. He will have to begin over again the next spring, worse off than before.

Let him receive the season's increment into his mind. Let him work it into the soil.

The finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer.

Make the human race a better head. Make the world a better piece of ground.

Growing weather; enough rain;

the cow's udder tight with milk;

the peach tree bent with its yield;

honey golden in the white comb;

the pastures deep in clover and grass,

enough, and more than enough;

the ground, new worked, moist

and yielding underfoot, the feet

comfortable in it as roots;

the early garden: potatoes, onions,

peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots,

radishes, marking their straight rows

with green, before the trees are leafed;

raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,

currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage,

strawberries red ripe with the white

flowers still on the vines—picked

with the dew on them, before breakfast;

grape clusters heavy under broad leaves,

powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness

—an ancient delight, delighting;

the bodies of children, joyful

without dread of their spending,

surprised at nightfall to be weary;

the bodies of women in loose cotton,

cool and closed in the evenings

of summer, like contented houses;

the bodies of men, able in the heat

and sweat and weight and length

of the day's work, eager in their spending,

attending to nightfall, the bodies of women;

sleep after love, dreaming

white lilies blooming

coolly out of the flesh;

after sleep, enablement

to go on with work, morning a clear gift;

the maidenhood of the day,

cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass;

the work of feeding and clothing and housing,

done with more than enough knowledge

and with more than enough love,

by those who do not have to be told;

any building well built, the rafters

firm to the walls, the walls firm,

the joists without give,

the proportions clear,

the fitting exact, even unseen,

bolts and hinges that turn home

without a jiggle;

any work worthy

of the day's maidenhood;

any man whose words

lead precisely to what exists,

who never stoops to persuasion;

the talk of friends, lightened and cleared

by all that can be assumed;

deer tracks in the wet path,

the deer sprung from them, gone on;

live streams, live shiftings

of the sun in the summer woods;

the great hollow-trunked beech,

a landmark I loved to return to,

its leaves gold-lit on the silver

branches in the fall: blown down

after a hundred years of standing,

a footbridge over the stream;

the quiet in the woods of a summer morning,

the voice of a pewee passing through it

like a tight silver wire;

a little clearing among cedars,

white clover and wild strawberries