New Collected Poems (25 page)

by what must bring me home.

I was walking in a dark valley

and above me the tops of the hills

had caught the morning light.

I heard the light singing as it went

among the grassblades and the leaves.

I waded upward through the shadow

until my head emerged,

my shoulders were mantled with the light,

and my whole body came up

out of the darkness, and stood

on the new shore of the day.

Where I had come was home,

for my own house stood white

where the dark river wore the earth.

The sheen of bounty was on the grass,

and the spring of the year had come.

Forgive me, my delight,

that grief and loneliness

have kept me. Though I come

to you in darkness, you are

companion of the light

that rises on all I know.

In the long night of the year

and of the spirit, God's birth

is met with simple noise.

Deaf and blind in division,

I reach, and do not find.

You show the gentler way:

We come to good by love;

our words must be made flesh.

And flesh must be made word

at last, our lives rise

in speech to our children's tongues.

They will tell how we once stood

together here, two trees

whose lives in annual sheddings

made their way into this ground,

whose bodies turned to earth

and song. The song will tell

how old love sweetens the fields.

My gentle hill, I rest

beside you in the dark

in a place warmed by my body,

where by ardor, grace, work,

and loss, I belong.

Who can impair thee, mighty King

Bridged and forgot, the river

in unwearying descent

carries down the soil

of ravaged uplands, waste

and acid from the strip mines,

poisons of our false

prosperity. What mind

regains of clarity

mourns, the current a slow

cortege of everything

that we have given up,

the materials of Creation

wrecked, the strewed substance

of our trust and dignity.

But on still afternoons

of summer, the water's face

recovers clouds, the shapes

of leaves. Maple, willow,

sycamore stand light

and easy in their weight,

their branching forms formed

on the water, and yellow

warbler, swallow, oriole

stroke their deft flight

through the river's serene reflection

of the sky, as though, corrupted,

it shows the incorrupt.

Is this memory or promise?

And what is grief beside it?

What is anger beside it?

It is unfinished. It will not

be finished. And a man's life

will be, although his work

will not, nor his desire

for clarity. Beside

this dark passage of water

I make my work, lifework

of many lives that has

no end, for it takes circles

of years, of birth and death

for pattern, eternal form

visible in mystery.

It takes for pattern the heavenly

and earthly song of which

it is a part, which holds it

from despair: the joined voices

of all things, all muteness

vocal in their harmony.

For that, though none can hear

or sing it all, though I

must by nature fail,

my work has turned away

the priced infinity

of mechanical desire.

This work that many loves

inspire teaches the mind

resemblance to the earth

in seasonal fashioning,

departures and returns

of song. The hands strive

against their gravity

for envisioned lights and forms,

fallings of harmony;

they strive, fail at their season's

end. The seasonless river

lays hand and handiwork

upon the world, obedient

to a greater Mind, whole

past holding or beholding,

in whose flexing signature

all the dooms assemble

and become the lives of things.

All that passes descends,

and ascends again unseen

into the light: the river

coming down from the sky

to hills, from hills to sea,

and carving as it moves,

to rise invisible,

gathered to light, to return

again. “The river's injury

is its shape.” I've learned no more.

We are what we are given

and what is taken away;

blessed be the name

of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes

is a gift, the meaning always

carried out of sight

to renew our whereabouts,

always a starting place.

And every gift is perfect

in its beginning, for it

is “from above, and cometh down

from the Father of lights.”

Gravity is grace.

All that has come to us

has come as the river comes,

given in passing away.

And if our wickedness

destroys the watershed,

dissolves the beautiful field,

then I must grieve and learn

that I possess by loss

the earth I live upon

and stand in and am. The dark

and then the light will have it.

I am newborn of pain

to love the new-shaped shore

where young cottonwoods

take hold and thrive in the wound,

kingfishers already nesting

in a hole in the sheared bank.

“What is left is what is”—

have learned no more. The shore

turns green under the songs

of the fires of the world's end,

and what is there to do?

Imagine what exists

so that it may shine

in thought light and day light,

lifted up in the mind.

The dark returns to light

in the kingfisher's blue and white

richly laid together.

He falls into flight

from the broken ground,

with strident outcry gathers

air under his wings.

In work of love, the body

forgets its weight. And once

again with love and singing

in my mind, I come to what

must come to me, carried

as a dancer by a song.

This grace is gravity.

 

I stood and heard the steps of the city

and dreamed a lighter stepping than I heard,

the tread of my people dancing in a ring.

I knew that circle broken, the steps awry,

stone and iron humming in the air.

But I thought even there, among the straying

steps, of the dance that circles life around,

its shadows moving on the ground, in rhyme

of flesh with flesh, time with time, our bliss,

the earthly song that heavenly is.

for Robert Penn Warren

At the first strokes of the fiddle bow

the dancers rise from their seats.

The dance begins to shape itself

in the crowd, as couples join,

and couples join couples, their movement

together lightening their feet.

They move in the ancient circle

of the dance. The dance and the song

call each other into being. Soon

they are one—rapt in a single

rapture, so that even the night

has its clarity, and time

is the wheel that brings it round.

In this rapture the dead return.

Sorrow is gone from them.

They are light. They step

into the steps of the living

and turn with them in the dance

in the sweet enclosure

of the song, and timeless

is the wheel that brings it round.

I would have each couple turn,

join and unjoin, be lost

in the greater turning

of other couples, woven

in the circle of a dance,

the song of long time flowing

over them, so they may return,

turn again in to themselves

out of desire greater than their own,

belonging to all, to each,

to the dance, and to the song

that moves them through the night.

What is fidelity? To what

does it hold? The point

of departure, or the turning road

that is departure and absence

and the way home? What we are

and what we were once

are far estranged. For those

who would not change, time

is infidelity. But we are married

until death, and are betrothed

to change. By silence, so,

I learn my song. I earn

my sunny fields by absence, once

and to come. And I love you

as I love the dance that brings you

out of the multitude

in which you come and go.

Love changes, and in change is true.

Forsaking all others, we

are true to all. What we love

here, we would not desecrate

anywhere. Seed or song, work

or sleep, no matter the need,

what we let fall, we keep.

The dance passes beyond us,

our loves loving their loves,

and returns, having passed through

the breaths and sleeps of the world,

the woven circuits of desire,

which leaving here arrive here.

Love moves in a bright sphere.

Past the strait of kept faith

the flesh rises, is joined

to light. Risen from distraction

and weariness, we come

into the turning and changing

circle of all lovers. On this height

our labor changes into flight.

In the great circle, dancing in

and out of time, you move now

toward your partners, answering

the music suddenly audible to you

that only carried you before

and will carry you again.

When you meet the destined ones

now dancing toward you,

we will be in line behind you,

out of your awareness for the time,

we whom you know, others we remember

whom you do not remember, others

forgotten by us all.

When you meet, and hold love

in your arms, regardless of all,

the unknown will dance away from you

toward the horizon of light.

Our names will flutter

on these hills like little fires.

for Guy Davenport

Within the circles of our lives

we dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasons

within the circles of the years,

the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons

within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go

changed, changing. Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,

grief and joy. The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes

we turn in pairs, that joining

joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,

out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

 

I go in under foliage

light with rain-light

in the hill's cleft,

and climb, my steps

silent as flight

on the wet leaves.

Where I go, stones

are wearing away

under the sky's flow.

The path I follow

I can hardly see

it is so faintly trod

and overgrown.

At times, looking,

I fail to find it

among dark trunks, leaves

living and dead. And then

I am alone, the woods

shapeless around me.

I look away, my gaze

at rest among leaves,

and then I see the path

again, a dark way going on

through the light.

In a mist of light

falling with the rain

I walk this ground

of which dead men

and women I have loved

are part, as they

are part of me. In earth,

in blood, in mind,

the dead and living

into each other pass,

as the living pass

in and out of loves

as stepping to a song.

The way I go is

marriage to this place,

grace beyond chance,

love's braided dance

covering the world.

Marriages to marriages

are joined, husband and wife

are plighted to all

husbands and wives,

any life has all lives

for its delight.

Let the rain come,

the sun, and then the dark,

for I will rest

in any easy bed tonight.