New Collected Poems (14 page)

beneath an opening to the sky

—heavenly, I thought it,

so perfect; had I foreseen it

I would have desired it

no less than it deserves;

fox tracks in snow, the impact

of lightness upon lightness,

unendingly silent.

What I know of spirit is astir

in the world. The god I have always expected

to appear at the woods' edge, beckoning,

I have always expected to be

a great relisher of this world, its good

grown immortal in his mind.

In the April rain I climbed up to drink

of the live water leaping off the hill,

white over the rocks. Where the mossy root

of a sycamore cups the flow, I drank

and saw the branches feathered with green.

The thickets, I said, send up their praise

at dawn. Was that what I meant—I meant

my words to have the heft and grace, the flight

and weight of the very hill, its life

rising—or was it some old exultation

that abides with me? We'll not soon escape

the faith of our fathers—no more than

crazy old Mrs. Gaines, whom my grandmother

remembers standing balanced eighty years ago

atop a fence in Port Royal, Kentucky,

singing: “One Lord, one Faith, and one

Cornbread.” They had a cage built for her

in a room, “nearly as big as the room, not

cramped up,” and when she grew wild

they kept her there. But mostly she went free

in the town, and they allowed the children

to go for walks with her. She strayed once

beyond where they thought she went, was lost

to them, “and they had an awful time

finding her.” For her, to be free

was only to be lost. What is it about her

that draws me on, so that my mind becomes a child

to follow after her? An old woman

when my grandmother was a girl, she must have seen

the virgin forest standing here, the amplitude

of our beginning, of which no speech

remains. Out of the town's lost history,

buried in minds long buried, she has come,

brought back by a memory near death. I see her

in her dusky clothes, hair uncombed, the children

following. I see her wandering, muttering

to herself as her way was, among these hills

half a century before my birth, in the silence

of such speech as I know. Dawn and twilight

and dawn again trembling in the leaves

over her, she tramped the raveling verges

of her time. It was a shadowy country

that she knew, holding a darkness that was past

and a darkness to come. The fleeting lights

tattered her churchly speech to mad song.

When her poor wandering head broke the confines

of all any of them knew, they put her in a cage.

But I am glad to know it was a commodious cage,

not cramped up. And I am glad to know

that other times the town left her free

to be as she was in it, and to go her way.

May it abide a poet with as much grace!

For I too am perhaps a little mad,

standing here wet in the drizzle, listening

to the clashing syllables of the water. Surely

there is a great Word being put together here.

I begin to hear it gather in the opening

of the flowers and the leafing-out of the trees,

in the growth of bird nests in the crotches

of the branches, in the settling of the dead

leaves into the ground, in the whittling

of beetle and grub, in my thoughts

moving in the hill's flesh. Coming here,

I crossed a place where a stream flows

underground, and the sounds of the hidden water

and the water come to light braided in my ear.

I think the maker is here, creating his hill

as it will be, out of what it was.

The thickets, I say, send up their praise

at dawn! One Lord, one Faith, and one Cornbread

forever! But hush. Wait. Be as still

as the dead and the unborn in whose silence

that old one walked, muttering and singing,

followed by the children.

For a time there

I turned away from the words I knew, and was lost.

For a time I was lost and free, speechless

in the multitudinous assembling of his Word.

Better born than married, misled,

in the heavy summers of the river bottom

and the long winters cut off by snow

she would crave gentle dainty things,

“a pretty little cookie or a cup of tea,”

but spent her days over a wood stove

cooking cornbread, kettles of jowl and beans

for the heavy, hungry, hard-handed

men she had married and mothered, bent

past unbending by her days of labor

that love had led her to. They had to break her

before she would lie down in her coffin.

While the summer's growth kept me

anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river

where it flowed, faithful to its way,

beneath the slope where my household

has taken its laborious stand.

I could not reach it even in dreams.

But one morning at the summer's end

I remember it again, as though its being

lifts into mind in undeniable flood,

and I carry my boat down through the fog,

over the rocks, and set out.

I go easy and silent, and the warblers

appear among the leaves of the willows,

their flight like gold thread

quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.

And I go on until I see, crouched

on a dead branch sticking out of the water,

a heron—so still that I believe

he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.

And then I see the articulation of feather

and living eye, a brilliance I receive

beyond my power to make, as he

receives in his great patience

the river's providence. And then I see

that I am seen. Still as I keep,

I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.

Suddenly I know I have passed across

to a shore where I do not live.

In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks

passing southward over the valley. The tall

sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks

to cold seed, by the river. And high

up the birds rose into sight against the darkening

clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading

landscapes of the sky like rags, as in

abandonment to the summons their blood knew.

And in my mind, where had stood a garden

straining to the light, there grew

an acceptance of decline. Having worked,

I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.

Always, on their generation's breaking wave,

men think to be immortal in the world,

as though to leap from water and stand

in air were simple for a man. But the farmer

knows no work or act of his can keep him

here. He remains in what he serves

by vanishing in it, becoming what he never was.

He will not be immortal in words.

All his sentences serve an art of the commonplace,

to open the body of a woman or a field

to take him in. His words all turn

to leaves, answering the sun with mute

quick reflections. Leaving their seed, his hands

have had a million graves, from which wonders

rose, bearing him no likeness. At summer's

height he is surrounded by green, his

doing, standing for him, awake and orderly.

In autumn, all his monuments fall.

The songs of small birds fade away

into the bushes after sundown,

the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.

Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters

flare in the dusk. The aged voices

of a few crickets thread the silence.

It is a quiet I love, though my life

too often drives me through it deaf.

Busy with costs and losses, I waste

the time I have to be here—a time

blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,

if only I would keep aware. The leaves

rest in the air, perfectly still.

I would like them to rest in my mind

as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,

the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,

poised there, light on the slope

as a young apple tree. A week ago

I took her away to sell, and failed

to get my price, and brought her home

again. Now in the quiet I stand

and look at her a long time, glad

to have recovered what is lost

in the exchange of something for money.

My daughter:
“I hope there's an animal

somewhere that nobody has ever seen.

And I hope nobody ever sees it.”

Being, whose flesh dissolves

at our glance, knower

of the secret sums and measures,

you are always here,

dwelling in the oldest sycamores,

visiting the faithful springs

when they are dark and the foxes

have crept to their edges.

I have come upon pools

in streams, places overgrown

with the woods' shadow,

where I knew you had rested,

watching the little fish

hang still in the flow;

as I approached they seemed

particles of your clear mind

disappearing among the rocks.

I have waked deep in the woods

in the early morning, sure

that while I slept

your gaze passed over me.

That we do not know you

is your perfection

and our hope. The darkness

keeps us near you.

. . . Except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone . . .

J
OHN 12:24

 

Shrugging in the flight of its leaves,

it is dying. Death is slowly

standing up in its trunk and branches

like a camouflaged hunter. In the night

I am wakened by one of its branches

crashing down, heavy as a wall, and then

lie sleepless, the world changed.

That is a life I know the country by.

Mine is a life I know the country by.

Willing to live and die, we stand here,

timely and at home, neighborly as two men.

Our place is changing in us as we stand,

and we hold up the weight that will bring us down.

In us the land enacts its history.

When we stood it was beneath us, and was

the strength by which we held to it

and stood, the daylight over it

a mighty blessing we cannot bear for long.

Willing to die,

you give up

your will, keep still

until, moved

by what moves

all else, you move.