New Collected Poems (5 page)

“I've lived in two countries

in my life

and never moved.”

He has spoken of the steamboats

of his boyhood, the whistles

still clear to him

in the upriver bends,

coming down to the landings

now disappeared, their names

less spoken every year.

He has remembered the open days

of that first country

—“It was
free
here

when I was a boy”—and the old

brutalities and sorrows.

And now they talk of power

and politics and war, agonies

now, and to come,

deaths never imagined

by the old man's generation.

The mistakes of the old

become the terrors of the young.

In the face of his grandson he sees

something of himself, going on.

Moved by the near suffering

of other men, he has taken them

into the body of his thought.

“If I died now, I wouldn't lose

much. It's you young ones

I worry about.”

Beyond the windows, past the fern

and the pot rims and the patterned

vine leaves, and the trees

in the yard, are the white housefronts

and storefronts of the little town,

facing the road. There are only

the two directions: coming in

and going out. And all

who take one take both.

The town, “port of entry

and departure for the bodies

as well as the souls of men,”

aspires to the greatness of the greatest

city of the mind—with its dead

for baggage. It suffers its dead beside it

under the particular grass, the summary stone.

Their hill keeps a silence into which

the live town speaks a little.

They are the town's shut record, all

their complexity perished—victims

of epidemics, meanness, foolishness,

heredity, war, recklessness, chance,

pride, time. None ever escaped.

That is the history of the place.

The town, its white walls

gleaming among black

shadows and green leaves,

stands on the surface of the eye.

And the town's history is the eye's

depth and recognition—is the mind's

discovery of itself in its place

in a new morning.

He begins the knowledge

of the sun's absence.

He's likely to wake up

any hour of the night

out of his light sleep

to know—with clarity like

the touch of hands in the dark—

the stillness of the room.

The silence

stretches over the town

like a black tent, whose hem

the headstones weight.

Into it come, now

and again, hard footsteps

on the road, remote

sudden voices, and then

a car coming in, or

going out, the headlights

levering the window's

image around the walls.

And he considers the size

of his life, lying in it there,

looking up out of it

into the darkness,

the transparence of all

his old years between him

and the darkness.

Before it's light

the birds waken, and begin

singing in the dark trees

around the house, among the leaves

over the dampened roofs

of the still town

and in the country thickets

for miles. Their voices

reach to the end of the dark.

At the foot of his long shadow

he walked across the town

early in the morning

to watch the carpenters at work

on a new house. The saws released

the warm pine-smell into the air

—the scent of time to come, freshly

opened. He was comforted by that,

and by the new unblemished wood.

That time goes, making

the jointures of households, for better

or worse, is no comfort.

That, for the men and women

still to be born, time is coming

is a comfort of sorts.

That there's a little of the good

left over from a few lives

is a comfort of sorts.

He has grown eager

in his love for the good dead

and all the unborn.

That failed hope

doesn't prove the failure of hope

is a comfort of sorts.

Grown old and wise, he takes

what comfort he can get, as gladly as once

he'd have taken the comfort he wished for.

For a man knowing evil—how surely

it grows up in any ground and makes seed—

the building of a house is a craft indeed.

The incredible happens, he knows.

The worst possibilities are real.

The terrible justifies

his dread of it. He knows winter

despondences, the mind inundated

by its excrement, hope gone

and not remembered.

And he knows vernal transfigurations,

the sentence in the stems of trees

noisy with old memory made new,

troubled with the seed

of the being of what has not been.

He trusts the changes of the sun and air:

dung and carrion made earth,

richness that forgets what it was.

He knows, if he can hold out

long enough, the good

is given its chance.

He has dreamed of a town

fit for the abiding of souls

and bodies that might live forever.

He has seen it as in a far-off

white and gold evening

of summer, the black flight

of swifts turning above it

in the air. There's a clarity

in which he has not become clear,

his body dragging a shadow,

half hidden in it.

The old man lives on

among sheds and tools

he won't use again, places

he won't go back to.

Around the place his living

has kept clear there's a wilderness

waiting for him to go.

In the wooded creek vales

of his memory, that his mind

opens slowly to become, all is

as it was, and must be,

the water thrush's note chinks

like dropping water

over the rocks. To old fields

and croplands the persistent

anachronism of wilderness

returns, oaks deepen in the hill,

their branches mesh,

into the pocketed shadows

slowly as rocks wear

the moss comes.

Behind him, as if imagined

before his birth, he leaves

silence no one has yet broken.

Ahead of him he sees, as in an old

forefather's prophetic dream,

the woods take back the land.

Knowing he must learn to die

or be beaten, he has looked

toward what he must come to,

that bad exchange

of all he knows for all

he doesn't.

He has become the sufferer

of what he cannot help.

Knowing the euphemisms

of the salesmen leave the mind

wordless before its trials,

he has learned

among the quick plants

of his memory

to speak of their end.

When vision is marketed to win

there's nothing in victory to desire.

And it's not victory

that he's going toward.

He leaves that for the others,

the younger, who will leave it.

It's a vision that generous men

make themselves willing to give up

in order to have.

His luxury is the giving up of vanity:

“Why should a man eighty-one years old

care how he looks?”

After his long wakeful life,

he has come to love the world

as though it's not to be lost.

Though he faces darkness, his hands

have no weight or harshness

on his small granddaughters' heads.

His love doesn't ask that they understand

it includes them. It includes, as freely,

the green plant leaves in the window,

clusters of white ripe peaches weighting

the branch among the weightless leaves.

There was an agony in ripening

that becomes irrelevant at last

to ripeness. His love

turned away from death, freely,

is equal to it.

There's no need to hurry

to die. His days are received

and let go, as birds fly

through the broken windows

of an old house. All his traps

are baited, but not set.

On the porch, in the potato rows,

among the shades and neighbors

of his summer walks,

he finds time

for the perfecting of gifts.

His intimate the green fern

lives in his eye, its profusion

veiling the earthen pot,

the leaves lighted and shadowed

among the actions of the morning.

Between the fern and the old man

there has been conversation

all their lives. The leaves

have spoken to his eyes.

He has replied with his hands.

In his handing it has come down

Until now—a living

that has survived

all successions and sheddings.

Even when he was a boy

plants were his talent. His mother

would give him the weak ones

until he made them grow,

then buy them, healed, for dimes.

And from her he inherits

the fern, the life of it

on which the new leaves crest.

It feeds on the sun and the dirt

and does not hasten.

It has forgotten all deaths.

The world has finally worn him

until he is no longer strange to it.

His face has grown comfortable on him.

His hat is shaped to his way

of putting it on and taking it off,

the crown bordered

with the dark graph of his sweat.

He has become a scholar of plants

and gardens, the student

of his memory, attentive to pipesmoke

and the movements of shadows. His days

come to him as if they know him.

He has become one of the familiars

of the place, like a landmark

the birds no longer fear.

Among the greens of full summer,

among shadows like monuments,

he makes his way down,

loving the earth he will become.

While we talk we hear across the town

two hammers galloping on a roof, and the high

curving squeal of an electric saw.

That is happening deep in the town's being,

as weighted and clumsy with its hope

as a pregnant woman or a loaded barge.

And the old man sitting beside me knows

the tools and vision of a builder

of houses, and the uses of those.

His strong marriage has made

the accuracy of his dwelling.

As though always speaking openly

in a clear room, he has made

the ways of neighborhood

between his house and the town.

His life has been a monument to the place.

His garden rows go back through all

his summers, bearing their fading

script of vine and bloom,

what he has written on the ground,

its kind abundance, taken kindly from it.

Now, resting from his walk,

he's comforted by the sounds