New Collected Poems (8 page)

that rises in the winter wind

beyond the blind wall

at his back.

It wears a patched robe

of some history that he knows

and some that he

does not: healed fields

where the woods come back

after a time of crops,

human history

done with, a few

ragged fences surviving

among the trees;

and on the ridges still

there are open fields

where the cattle look up

to watch him on his walks

with eyes patient as time.

The hill has known

too many days and men

grown quiet behind him.

But there are mornings

when his soul emerges

from darkness

as out of a hollow in a tree

high on the crest

and takes flight

with savage joy and harsh

outcry down the long slope

of the leaves. And nights

when he sleeps sweating

under the burden of the hill.

At the window

he sits and looks out,

musing on the river,

a little brown hen duck

paddling upstream

among the windwaves

close to the far bank.

What he has understood

lies behind him

like a road in the woods. He is

a wilderness looking out

at the wild.

A warm day in December,

and the rain falling

steadily through the morning

as the man works

at his table, the window

staring into the valley

as though conscious

when he is not. The cold river

steams in the warm air.

It is rising. Already

the lowest willows

stand in the water

and the swift currents

fold round them.

The bare twigs of the elms

are beaded with bright drops

that grow slowly heavy

and fall, bigger

and slower than the rain.

A fox squirrel comes

through the trees, hurrying

someplace, but it seems

to be raining everywhere,

and he submits to wetness

and sits still, miserable

maybe, for an hour.

How sheltering and clear

the window seems, the dry fireheat

inside, and outside the gray

downpour. As the man works

the weather moves

upon his mind, its dreariness

a kind of comfort.

Outside the window

is a roofed wooden tray

he fills with seeds for the birds.

They make a sort of dance

as they descend and light

and fly off at a slant

across the strictly divided

black sash. At first

they came fearfully, worried

by the man's movements

inside the room. They watched

his eyes, and flew

when he looked. Now they expect

no harm from him

and forget he's there.

They come into his vision,

unafraid. He keeps

a certain distance and quietness

in tribute to them.

That they ignore him

he takes in tribute to himself.

But they stay cautious

of each other, half afraid, unwilling

to be too close. They snatch

what they can carry and fly

into the trees. They flirt out

with tail or beak and waste

more sometimes then they eat.

And the man, knowing

the price of seed, wishes

they would take more care.

But they understand only

what is free, and he

can give only as they

will take. Thus they have

enlightened him. He buys

the seed, to make it free.

The river is rising,

approaching the window

in awful nearness.

Over it the air holds

a tense premonition

of the water's dark body

living where yesterday

things breathed. As he works

through the morning

the man has trouble

in the corner of his eye,

whole trees turning

in the channel as they go by,

the currents loaded

with the trash of the woods

and the trash of towns,

bearing down, and rising.

There is a sort of vertical

geography that portions his life.

Outside, the chickadees

and titmice scrounge

his sunflower seed. The cardinals

feed like fires on mats of drift

lying on the currents

of the swollen river.

The air is a bridge

and they are free. He imagines

a necessary joy

in things that must fly

to eat. He is set apart

by the black grid of the window

and, below it, the table

of the contents of his mind:

notes and remnants,

uncompleted work,

unanswered mail,

unread books

—the subjects of conscience,

his yoke-fellow,

whose whispered accounting

has stopped one ear, leaving him

half deaf to the world.

Some pads of paper,

eleven pencils,

a leaky pen,

a jar of ink

are his powers. He'll

never fly.

Rising, the river

is wild. There is no end

to what one may imagine

whose lands and buildings

lie in its reach. To one

who has felt his little boat

taken this way and that

in the braided currents

it is beyond speech.

“What's the river doing?”

“Coming up.”

In Port Royal, that begins

a submergence of minds.

Heads are darkened.

To the man at work

through the mornings

in the long-legged cabin

above the water, there is

an influence of the rise

that he feels in his footsoles

and in his belly

even when he thinks

of something else. The window

looks out, like a word,

upon the wordless, fact

dissolving into mystery, darkness

overtaking light.

And the water reaches a height

it can only fall from, leaving

the tree trunks wet.

It has made a roof

to its rising, and become

a domestic thing.

It lies down in its place

like a horse in his stall.

Facts emerge from it:

drift it has hung in the trees,

stranded cans and bottles,

new carving in the banks

—a place of change, changed.

It leaves a mystic plane

in the air, a membrane

of history stretched between

the silt-lines on the banks,

a depth that for months

the man will go from his window

down into, knowing

he goes within the reach

of a dark power: where

the birds are, fish

were.

How fine

to have a long-legged house

with a many-glassed window

looking out on the river

—and the wren singing

on a winter morning! How fine

to sweep the floor,

opening the doors

to let the air change,

and then to sit down

in the freshened room,

day pouring in the window!

But this is only for a while.

This house was not always

here. Another stood

in its place, and weathered

and grew old. He tore it down

and used the good of it

to build this. And farther on

another stood

that is gone. Nobody

alive now knows

how it looked, though some

recall a springhouse

that is gone too now. The stones

strew the pasture grass

where a roan colt grazes

and lifts his head to snort

at commotions in the wind.

All passes, and the man

at work in the house

has mostly ceased to mind.

There will be pangs

of ending, and he regrets

the terrors men bring to men.

But all passes—there is even

a kind of solace in that.

He has imagined animals

grazing at nightfall

on the place where his house stands.

Already his spirit

is with them, with a strange attentiveness,

hearing the grass

quietly tearing as they graze.

The country where he lives

is haunted

by the ghost of an old forest.

In the cleared fields

where he gardens

and pastures his horses

it stood once,

and will return. There will be

a resurrection of the wild.

Already it stands in wait

at the pasture fences.

It is rising up

in the waste places of the cities.

When the fools of the capitals

have devoured each other

in righteousness,

and the machines have eaten

the rest of us, then

there will be the second coming

of the trees. They will come

straggling over the fences

slowly, but soon enough.

The highways will sound

with the feet of the wild herds,

returning. Beaver will ascend

the streams as the trees

close over them.

The wolf and the panther

will find their old ways

through the nights. Water

and air will flow clear.

Certain calamities

will have passed,

and certain pleasures.

The wind will do without

corners. How difficult

to think of it: miles and miles

and no window.

Sometimes he thinks the earth

might be better without humans.

He's ashamed of that.

It worries him,

him being a human, and needing

to think well of the others

in order to think well of himself.

And there are

a few he thinks well of,

a few he loves

as well as himself almost,

and he would like to say

better. But history

is so largely unforgivable.

And now his mighty government

wants to help everybody

even if it has to kill them

to do it—like the fellow in the story

who helped his neighbor to Heaven:

“I heard the Lord calling him,

Judge, and I sent him on.”

According to the government

everybody is just waiting

to be given a chance

to be like us. He can't

go along with that.

Here is a thing, flesh of his flesh,

that he hates. He would like

a little assurance

that no one will destroy the world

for some good cause.

Until he dies, he would like his life

to pertain to the earth.

But there is something in him

that will wait, even

while he protests,

for things turn out as they will.

Out his window this morning

he saw nine ducks in flight,

and a hawk dive at his mate

in delight.

The day stands apart

from the calendar. There is a will

that receives it as enough.

He is given a fragment of time

in this fragment of the world.

He likes it pretty well.

The longest night is past.

It is the blessed morning of the year.

Beyond the window, snow

in patches on the river bank,

frosty sunlight on the dry corn,

and buds on the water maples

red, red in the cold.

The sycamore gathers

out of the sky, white

in the glance that looks up to it

through the black crisscross

of the window. But it is not a glance

that it offers itself to.

It is no lightning stroke

caught in the eye. It stays,

an old holding in place.

And its white is not so pure

as a glance would have it,

but emerges partially,

the tree's renewal of itself,

among the mottled browns

and olives of the old bark.

Its dazzling comes into the sun

a little at a time

as though a god in it

is slowly revealing himself.

How often the man of the window

has studied its motley trunk,

the out-starting of its branches,

its smooth crotches,

its revelations of whiteness,

hoping to see beyond his glances,

the distorting geometry

of preconception and habit,

to know it beyond words.

All he has learned of it

does not add up to it.

There is a bird who nests in it

in the summer and seems to sing of it—

the quick lights among its leaves

—better than he can.

It is not by his imagining

its whiteness comes.

The world is greater than its words.

To speak of it the mind must bend.

His mind gone from the window

into dark thought, suddenly

a flash of water

lights in the corner of his eye:

the kingfisher is rising,

laden, out of his plunge,

the water still subsiding

under the bare willow.

The window becomes a part

of his mind's history, the entrance

of days into it. And awake

now, watching the water flow

beyond the glass, his mind

is watched by a spectre of itself

that is a window on the past.

Life steadily adding

its subtractions, it has fallen

to him to remember

and old man who, dying,

dreamed of his garden,

a harvest so bountiful

he couldn't carry it home

—another who saw

in the flaws of the moon

a woman's face