New Collected Poems (7 page)

I must end, always, by replacing

our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,

the flowing in of history, putting back what I took away,

trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge

to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.

My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness

growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.

I see that my mind is not good enough.

I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.

I find in my mouth a bitter taste of money,

a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.

I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all

that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.

Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?

for Harry Caudill

In the place that is my own place, whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in

that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

In the town's graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself

of sorrow, the myrtle of the graves grown wild. The last

who knew the faces who had these names are dead,

and now the names fade, dumb on the stones, wild

as shadows in the grass, clear to the rabbit and the wren.

Ungrieved, the town's ancestry fits the earth. They become

a meadow, their alien marble grown native as maple.

Believe the automatic righteousness

of whoever holds an office. Believe

the officials who see without doubt

that peace is assured by war, freedom

by oppression. The truth preserved by lying

becomes a lie. Believe or die.

In the name of ourselves we ride

at the wheels of our engines,

in the name of Plenty devouring all,

the exhaust of our progress falling

deadly on villages and fields

we do not see. We are prepared

for millions of little deaths.

Where are the quiet plenteous dwellings

we were coming to, the neighborly holdings?

We see the American freedom defended

with lies, and the lies defended

with blood, the vision of Jefferson

served by the agony of children,

women cowering in holes.

Dark with power, we remain

the invaders of our land, leaving

deserts where forests were,

scars where there were hills.

On the mountains, on the rivers,

on the cities, on the farmlands

we lay weighted hands, our breath

potent with the death of all things.

Pray to us, farmers and villagers

of Vietnam. Pray to us, mothers

and children of helpless countries.

Ask for nothing.

We are carried in the belly

of what we have become

toward the shambles of our triumph,

far from the quiet houses.

Fed with dying, we gaze

on our might's monuments of fire.

The world dangles from us

while we gaze.

A high wooded hill near Florence, an April

afternoon. Below, the valley farms

were still and small, stall and field

hushed in brightness. Around us the woods

woke with sound, and shadows lived

in the air and on the dry leaves. You

were drawing what we saw. Its forms

and lights reached slowly to your page.

We talked, and laughed at what we said.

Fine hours. The sort men dream

of having, and of having had. Today

while I slept I saw it all

again, and words for you came to me

as though we sat there talking still

in the quick of April. A wakening

strangeness—here in another valley

you never lived to come to—half

a dialogue, keeping on.

All goes back to the earth,

and so I do not desire

pride of excess or power,

but the contentments made

by men who have had little:

the fisherman's silence

receiving the river's grace,

the gardner's musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.

I am never wholly in place.

I find no peace or grace.

We sell the world to buy fire,

our way lighted by burning men,

and that has bent my mind

and made me think of darkness

and wish for the dumb life of roots.

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

for Gurney Norman, quoting him

The woods is shining this morning.

Red, gold and green, the leaves

lie on the ground, or fall,

or hang full of light in the air still.

Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes

the place it has been coming to forever.

It has not hastened here, or lagged.

See how surely it has sought itself,

its roots passing lordly through the earth.

See how without confusion it is

all that it is, and how flawless

its grace is. Running or walking, the way

is the same. Be still. Be still.

“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”

In a time that breaks

in cutting pieces all around,

when men, voiceless

against thing-ridden men,

set themselves on fire, it seems

too difficult and rare

to think of the life of a man

grown whole in the world,

at peace and in place.

But having thought of it

I am beyond the time

I might have sold my hands

or sold my voice and mind

to the arguments of power

that go blind against

what they would destroy.

to Tanya

How hard it is for me, who live

in the excitement of women

and have the desire for them

in my mouth like salt. Yet

you have taken me and quieted me.

You have been such light to me

that other women have been

your shadows. You come near me

with the nearness of sleep.

And yet I am not quiet.

It is to be broken. It is to be

torn open. It is not to be

reached and come to rest in

ever. I turn against you,

I break from you, I turn to you.

We hurt, and are hurt,

and have each other for healing.

It is healing. It is never whole.

You will be walking some night

in the comfortable dark of your yard

and suddenly a great light will shine

round about you, and behind you

will be a wall you never saw before.

It will be clear to you suddenly

that you were about to escape,

and that you are guilty: you misread

the complex instructions, you are not

a member, you lost your card

or never had one. And you will know

that they have been there all along,

their eyes on your letters and books,

their hands in your pockets,

their ears wired to your bed.

Though you have done nothing shameful,

they will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you say you are ashamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

then such light as you have made

in your history will leave you.

They will no longer need to pursue you.

You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.

They will not forgive you.

There is no power against them.

It is only candor that is aloof from them,

only an inward clarity, unashamed,

that they cannot reach. Be ready.

When their light has picked you out

and their questions are asked, say to them:

“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon

will come around you. The heron will begin

his evening flight from the hilltop.

Window. Window.

The wind's eye

to see into the wind.

The eye in its hollow

looking out

through the black frame

at the waves the wind

drives up the river,

whitecaps, a wild day,

the white sky

traveled by snow squalls,

the trees thrashing,

the corn blades driven,

quivering, straight out.

The foliage has dropped

below the window's grave edge,

baring the sky, the distant

hills, the branches,

the year's greenness

gone down from the high

light where it so fairly

defied falling.

The country opens to the sky,

the eye purified among hard facts:

the black grid of the window,

the wood of trees branching

outward and outward

to the nervousness of twigs,

buds asleep in the air.

The window has forty

panes, forty clarities

variously wrinkled, streaked

with dried rain, smudged,

dusted. The frame

is a black grid

beyond which the world

flings up the wild

graph of its growth,

tree branch, river,

slope of land,

the river passing

downward, the clouds blowing,

usually, from the west,

the opposite way.

The window is a form

of consciousness, pattern

of formed sense

through which to look

into the wild

that is a pattern too,

but dark and flowing,

bearing along the little

shapes of the mind

as the river bears

a sash of some blinded house.

This windy day

on one of the panes

a blown seed, caught

in cobweb, beats and beats.

This is the wind's eye,

Wendell's window

dedicated to purposes

dark to him, a seeing into

days to come, the winds

of the days as they approach

and go by. He has come

mornings of four years

to be thoughtful here

while day and night

cold and heat

beat upon the world.

In the low room

within the weathers,

sitting at the window,

he has shed himself

at times, and been renewed.

The spark at his wrist

flickers and dies, flickers

and dies. The life in him

grows and subsides

and grows again

like the icicle throbbing

winter after winter

at a wrinkle in the eave,

flowing over itself

as it comes and goes,

fluid as a branch.

Look in

and see him looking out.

He is not always

quiet, but there have been times

when happiness has come

to him, unasked,

like the stillness on the water

that holds the evening clear

while it subsides

—and he let go

what he was not.

His ancestor is the hill