Ivar Oakeson’s Fiddle
Question in the Los Gatos Hills
How David Did Not Care
How the Saint Did Not Care
How Jonah Did Not Care
The Dark Egg
How Mirabai Did Not Care
Time Runs Backward after Death
MORNING POEMS (1997)
I.
Early Morning in Your Room
The Shocks We Put Our Pitchforks Into
Why We Don’t Die
Hawthorne and the Elephant
The Old Woman Frying Perch
Conversation with the Soul
He Wanted to Live His Life Over
The Glimpse of Something in the Oven
Bad People
Things to Think
Two Ways to Write Poems
The Barn at Elabuga
The Russian
II.
Some Men Find It Hard to Finish Sentences
Visiting the Eighty-Five-Year-Old Poet
All These Stories
The Resemblance between Your Life and a Dog
Reading in a Boat
Waking on the Farm
When Threshing Time Ends
A Family Photograph, Sunday Morning, 1940
A Farm in Western Minnesota
For a Childhood Friend, Marie
What the Animals Paid
The Bear and the Man
When My Dead Father Called
III.
The Green Cookstove
The Playful Deeds of the Wind
It’s So Easy to Give In
Wanting More Applause at a Conference
Calling Your Father
Thinking about Old Jobs
Conversation with a Monster
The Black Figure below the Boat
The Man Who Didn’t Know What Was His
The Mouse
The Storm
The Yellow Dot
IV.
It’s As If Someone Else Is with Me
A Week of Poems at Bennington
The Dog’s Ears
When the Cat Stole the Milk
Being Happy All Night
The Widowed Friend
We Only Say That
Wounding Others
What the Buttocks Think
What Bill Stafford Was Like
A Poem Is Some Remembering
Rethinking Wallace Stevens
Tasting Heaven
Wallace Stevens in the Fourth Grade
The Waltz
V.
The Neurons Who Watch Birds
A Question the Bundle Had
Seeing the Eclipse in Maine
Clothespins
The Face in the Toyota
The Scandal
Looking at the Stars
After a Friend’s Death
The Parcel
My Doubts on Going to Visit a New Friend
One Source of Bad Information
Thoughts
The Grandparent and the Granddaughter
The Ocean Rising and Falling
Ocean Rain and Music
VI.
Looking at Aging Faces
November
Three-Day Fall Rain
Winter Afternoon by the Lake
Isaac Bashevis and Pasternak
People Like Us
A Christmas Poem
Reading Silence in the Snowy Fields
Words the Dreamer Spoke to My Father in Maine
Visiting Sand Island
A Poem for Giambattista Vico Written by the Pacific
For Ruth
A Conversation with a Mouse
THE NIGHT ABRAHAM CALLED TO THE STARS (2001)
I.
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
The Wildebeest
Jerez at Easter
Giordano Bruno and the Muddy Footprint
Moses’ Cradle
The Dead of Shiloh
When We Became Lovers
Monet’s Haystacks
What Kept Horace Alive
The Love from Far Away
II.
Eudalia and Plato
The Trap-Door
Hannibal and Robespierre
Walking Backward
Wanting to Steal Time
Calderón
The Wagon and the Cliff
Forgiving the Mailman
The Way the Parrot Learns
Rembrandt’s Portrait of Titus with a Red Hat
III.
Nikos and His Donkey
Pitzeem and the Mare
The Country Roads
Iseult and the Badger
In Praise of Scholars
The Fish in the Window
Montserrat
The French Generals
The Battle at Ypres, 1915
The Raft of Green Logs
IV.
The Five Inns
The Baal Shem and Francis Bacon
Natchez Inns
The Cabbages of Chekhov
The Eel in the Cave
Rembrandt’s Etchings
The Cardinal’s Cry
The Old St. Peter by Rembrandt
Why Is It the Spark’s Fault?
Augustine on His Ship
V.
The Difficult Word
Testifying to the Night
The Storyteller’s Way
How This Wealth Came to Be
Noah Watching the Rain
Listening
So Be It. Amen.
Dawn
MY SENTENCE WAS A THOUSAND YEARS OF JOY (2005)
I.
The Dark Autumn Nights
A Poem for Andrew Marvell
Listening to the Sitar before Dawn
Loafing with Friends at Ojo Caliente
When I Am with You
There Are So Many Platos
Bach’s B Minor Mass
The Blind Tobit
The Greek Ships
Visiting the Teacher
II.
Growing Wings
Tightening the Cinch
Call and Answer
Advice from the Geese
The Blinding of Samson
The Nest in Which We Were Born
Rembrandt’s Brown Ink
The Pelicans at White Horse Key
Flamenco Singers in Granada
The Horses Coming Up Behind
III.
Brahms
Jacob and Rachel
What to Do with the Garden
The Shoehorn
Singing the Same Throaty Note
The Pistachio Nut
Listening to Old Music
Hiding in a Drop of Water
For Robert Motherwell
Listening to Shahram Nazeri
IV.
Mailing Evidence to the Prosecutors
Waking in the Middle of the Night
A Week in Florence
Rameau’s Music
Losing the House in a Card Game
A History of Mourning
A Week on the Oregon Coast
Sand Heaps
The Dingy Playing Cards
The Fat Old Couple Whirling Around
V.
Shabistari and The Secret Garden
The Night the Cities Burned
The Bridegroom
The Head of Barley
Adam’s Understanding
The Buff-Chested Grouse
Stealing Sugar from the Castle
TALKING INTO THE EAR OF A DONKEY (2011)
I.
Ravens Hiding in a Shoe
Courting Forgetfulness
Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat
Paying Attention to the Melody
Longing for the Acrobat
Nirmala’s Music
The Frogs after Dark
The Sympathies of the Long-Married
The Blind Old Man
Father and Son
II.
Rains
The Roof Nail
A Day in Late June
Dealing with Parents
The Sense of Getting Older
The Old Fishing Lines
Walking Out in the Morning
A Poetry Reading in Maryland
The Lost Trapper
Starting a Poem
I Have Daughters and I Have Sons
The Mourning Dove’s Call
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey
Wanting Sumptuous Heavens
III.
A Family Thing
The Water Tank
The Box of Chocolates
Keeping Quiet
The Day the Dock Comes In
Morning Pajamas
That Problem in the Family
IV.
Heard Whispers
The Slim Fir Seeds
The Big-Nostrilled Moose
Turkish Pears
Thoreau as a Lover
In a Time of Losses
So Much Time
The Grackles
For the Old Gnostics
The Pheasant Chicks
Orion and the Farmstead
Silent in the Moonlight
A Ramage for the Mountain
What Is Sorrow For?
Lovers in the River
The Camels
V.
Sunday Afternoon
The Teapot
Ready to Sleep
The Housefly
My Father at Forty
My Mother
It’s Morning Again
Something to Do for Aunt Clara
The Man at the Door
The Hermit
A Poetry Reading at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas
VI.
Uncertainty
The Threshers
The Longing
What Did We See Today?
The Long-Leggéd Birds
Hearing Music at Dawn
The Hawk in His Nest
My Mournful Room
About My Father
Smoke-Stained Fingers
What the Old Poets Failed to Say
Acknowledgments
Index of Titles and First Lines
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Thomas R. Smith, who has over many years given me keen advice on poem after poem. His vast and constant efforts to sort and select versions of some of these poems has helped greatly to fulfill my vision for this book.
I am grateful too to my editor at Norton, Jill Bialosky, for her enthusiasm and support for this mammoth gathering, and to her assistant, Drew Weitman, who shepherded it so carefully through the many intricate stages of production.
The poems in this volume first appeared in the following collections: Silence in the Snowy Fields, Wesleyan University Press, 1962; The Light Around the Body, Harper and Row, 1967; The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, City Lights, 1970; Sleepers Joining Hands, Harper and Row, 1973; Jumping Out of Bed, Barre Publishers, 1973, revised 1987; The Point Reyes Poems, Mudra, 1974; The Morning Glory, Harper and Row, 1975; This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, Harper and Row, 1977; This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, Harper and Row, 1979, revised 1992; The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Dial Press, 1981; Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, Dial Press, 1985; Meditations on the Insatiable Soul, HarperCollins, 1994; Morning Poems, HarperCollins, 1997; The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, HarperCollins, 2001; My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, HarperCollins, 2005; Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, W. W. Norton, 2011. Thanks to the publishers for permission to reprint.
My grateful acknowledgment to Dennis Maloney at White Pine Press for permission to reprint revised versions of poems from Jumping Out of Bed (1987) and revised versions of some prose poems from Reaching Out to the World: New and Selected Prose Poems (2009).
SILENCE
IN
THE
SNOWY
FIELDS
(1962)
We are all asleep in the outward man.
—Jacob Boehme
ELEVEN POEMS OF SOLITUDE
THREE KINDS OF PLEASURES
I
Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin
Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles
One by one lift themselves out of the fence line
And past them, the snowy fields.
II
The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields
In Wisconsin: and on these black trees
Scattered, one by one,
Through the winter fields—
We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,
And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the combine.
III
It is a pleasure, also, to be driving
Toward Chicago, near dark,
And see the lights in the barns.
The bare trees more dignified than ever,
Like a fierce man on his deathbed,
And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.
RETURN TO SOLITUDE
I
It is a moonlit, windy night.
The moon has pushed out the Milky Way.
Clouds are hardly alive, and the grass is leaping.
It is the hour of return.
II
We want to go back, to return to the sea,
The sea of solitary corridors,
And halls of wild nights,
Explosions of grief,
Diving into the sea of death,
Like the stars of the wheeling Bear.
III
What shall we find when we return?
Friends changed, houses moved,
Trees perhaps, with new leaves.
WAKING FROM SLEEP
Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.
It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats are covered with fur skins, the yard is full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily hold heavy books.
Now we wake, and rise from the bed, and eat breakfast!—
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising, the knocks of wooden tackle in the sunlight.
Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.
HUNTING PHEASANTS IN A CORNFIELD
I
What is so strange about a tree alone in an open field?
It is a willow tree. I walk around and around it.
The body is strangely torn, and cannot leave it.
At last I sit down beneath it.
II
It is a willow tree alone in acres of dry corn.
Its leaves are scattered around its trunk, and around me,
Brown now, and speckled with delicate black,
Only the cornstalks now can make a noise.
III
The sun is cold, burning through the frosty distances of space.
The weeds are frozen to death long ago.
Why then do I love to watch
The sun moving on the chill skin of the branches?
IV
The mind has shed leaves alone for years.
It stands apart with small creatures near its roots.
I am happy in this ancient place,
A spot easily caught sight of above the corn,
If I were a young animal ready to turn home at dusk.
SURPRISED BY EVENING
There is unknown dust that is near us,
Waves breaking on shores just over the hill,
Trees full of birds that we have never seen,
Nets drawn down with dark fish.
The evening arrives; we look up and it is there,
It has come through the nets of the stars,
Through the tissues of the grass,
Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.
The day shall never end, we think:
We have hair that seems born for the daylight;
But, at last, the quiet waters of the night will rise,
And our skin shall see far off, as it does underwater.
THINKING OF WALLACE STEVENS ON THE FIRST SNOWY DAY IN DECEMBER
This new snow seems to speak of virgins
With frail clothes made of gold,
Just as the old snow shall whisper
Of concierges in France.
The new dawn sings of beaches
Dazzling as sugar and clean as the clouds of Greece,
Just as the exhausted dusk shall sing
Of the waves on the western shore.
This new strength whispers of the darkness of death,
Of the frail skiff lost in the giant cave,
Just as in the boat nearing death you sang
Of feathers and white snow.
SUNSET AT A LAKE
The sun is sinking. Here on the pine-haunted bank, the mosquitoes fly around drowsily, and moss stands out as if it wanted to speak. Calm falls on the lake, which now seems heavier and inhospitable. Far out, rafts of ducks drift like closed eyes, and a thin line of silver caused by something invisible slowly moves toward shore in the viscous darkness under the southern bank. Only a few birds, the troubled ones, speak to the darkening roof of earth; small weeds stand abandoned, the clay is sending her gifts back to the center of the earth.
FALL
Because it is the first Sunday of pheasant season, men gather in the lights of cars to divide pheasants, and the chickens, huddling near their electricity, and in some slight fear of the dark, walk for the last time about their little hut, whose floor now seems so bare.
The dusk has come, a glow in the west, as if seen through the isinglass on old coal stoves, and the cows stand around the barn door; now the farmer looks up at the paling sky reminding him of death, and in the fields the bones of the corn rustle faintly in the last wind, and the half-moon stands in the south.