VISITING THE EIGHTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD POET
The eighty-five-year-old man stands up,
And walks to the bookcase, his hair tousled,
His legs thin, to fetch a book, then pulls
It down and says, “No doubt you’ve already read this?”
He has. He paddles among these ice floes,
These enormous fat books, like a great Eskimo
Hunter, for there are seals below in the sea,
Offering their hides, their fat, their great lonesome eyes.
“Oh yes!” he says, “Oh yes.” Some truths have been
Said. Someone in China or Hardanger has written great
Poems. “Oh yes.” He stands again, goes to the wall.
“Emerson was a keen reader. Oh yes!”
He has lived his whole life on three acres
Of apple trees, chopping wood, visiting
The madhouse, throwing plates against the wall,
Translating, packing apples, writing poems.
I am proud to know him, this old man late in life
Who stands up and says, “No doubt you’ve already lived this?”
For the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge
ALL THESE STORIES
There are so many stories. In one, a bear
Marries a sailing ship, and they have children
Who are islands (covered with low brush).
In another an obstinate woman floats upstream.
Or the child wailing on a rock, set ashore
By her seal mother (her real mother), waits
And wails, and faces appear at windows until
Charlotte Brontë agrees to begin her novel.
You know stories like that. The Terrible Nurse
Throws the Daughter into the sea. A whale
Swallows her, and she is free from husband
And children long enough to be herself.
Something in us wants things to happen.
We twist our ankle and end up reading Gibbon.
In some dreams a wolf pursues us until we
Turn into swallows, and agree to live in longing.
THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND A DOG
I never intended to have this life, believe me—
It just happened. You know how dogs turn up
At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain.
It’s good if you can accept your life—you’ll notice
Your face has become deranged trying to adjust
To it. Your face thought your life would look
Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.
That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.
Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.
Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers,
Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.
You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you,
But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow.
Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles,
Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.
READING IN A BOAT
I was glad to be in that boat, floating
Under oak leaves that had been
Carved by crafty light.
How many times during the night
I laughed, because She
Came near, and stayed, or returned.
The boat stopped, and I woke.
But the pages kept turning. I jumped
Back in the book, and caught up.
I was not in pain, not hungry,
Friend, I was alive, sleeping,
And all that time reading a book.
WAKING ON THE FARM
I can remember the early mornings—how the stubble,
A little proud with frost, snapped as we walked.
How the John Deere tractor hood pulled heat
Away from our hands when we filled it with gas.
And the way the sun brought light right out of the ground.
It turned on a whole hill of stubble as easily as a single stone.
Breathing seemed frail and daring in the morning.
To pull in air was like reading a whole novel.
The angleworms, turned up by the plow, looked
Uneasy like shy people trying to avoid praise.
For a while we had goats. They were like turkeys
Only more reckless. One butted a red Chevrolet.
When we washed up at noon, we were more ordinary.
But the water kept something in it of the early morning.
WHEN THRESHING TIME ENDS
There is a time. Things end.
All the fields are clean.
Belts are put away.
And the horses go home.
What is left endures
In the minds of boys
Who wanted this joy
Never to end.
The splashing of hands,
Jokes and oats:
It was a music
Touching and fervent.
The Bible was right.
Presences come and go.
Wash in cold water.
The fire has moved.
A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH, SUNDAY MORNING, 1940
They’ve gathered on the farm lawn, ten people, all ages.
Esther Berg’s hair has waves like Clara Bow’s;
The women look as if they have too much to do.
One boy smiles—it is me—and looks down. He seems glad,
But his sweater sleeve is too short. The men’s hands,
None placed in pockets, all hang down.
They look as if they wanted to grasp something.
The men smile, but their eyes say hard things.
“The world pulls at me—it tore my father
Away already. That forty-acre farm he bought
By Marietta is still black. I have to go now.”
It was nineteen-forty, grasshoppers, hard times.
Two old women who guard the group on both sides
Take nothing on trust. “I trust my hands, and that’s all.”
A FARM IN WESTERN MINNESOTA
When I look at childhood, I see the yellow rose bush
Grandma planted near her door, the gravel
Beneath the bicycle tires, and the new legs pumping
As we raced along; and the roads that invited us
West—only a mile from home the land began to rise.
We tried those wind chargers. My father
Was open to any new idea, and one day
A thousand sheep—starving—arrived in cattle cars
From Montana—almost free. We took four
Hundred. How thin they were! Some lived for years.
Many rooms were cold at night, and the hired men
Didn’t have much of a life. Sometimes they’d just leave.
I remember my father throwing dead ewes over
The edge of the gravel pit. It was efficient. There
Was work to do, but no one learned how to say goodbye.
FOR A CHILDHOOD FRIEND, MARIE
She knew a lot about life on a farm: wagon
Poles that sometimes broke, and grown men
Pinned against the fencepost by a bull.
Sometimes you tie a favorite lamb
To a tree so that the old bucks will not kill him,
And he hangs himself from the rope.
Movies Saturday night—girls laughed
Behind their sleeves, at men or boys.
Marie, thirty years old, still loved
The high school, the tall boys, gossip
About the teachers, the proms. She also
Loved our lives that were not going
So well. She married the hired man—
My grandmother told her not to—and he drank.
WHAT THE ANIMALS PAID
The Hampshire ewes standing in their wooden pens,
Their shiny black hooves close to each other,
Had to pay with their wool, with their wombs,
With their eating, with their fear of the dogs.
Every animal had to pay. Horses paid all day;
They pulled stone-boats and the ground pulled back.
And the pigs? They paid with their squealing
When the knife entered the throat and the blood
Followed it out. The blood, steaming and personal,
Paid it. Any debt left over the intestines paid.
“I am what I am.” The pig could not say that.
The women paid with their bowed heads, and the men,
My father among them, paid with their drinking.
Demons shouted: “Pay to the last drop!”
THE BEAR AND THE MAN
Suppose there were a bear and a man. The bear
Knows his kin—old pebbles, fifty-five-
Gallon barrels, big pine trees in the moonlight,
Abandoned down jackets; and the man approaches warily—
He’s read Tolstoy, knows a few symphonies.
That’s about it. Each has lost a son. The bear’s
killed by a trap, the man’s killed by a bear.
That boy was partly drunk, alone in the woods.
The bear puts out black claws firmly on earth.
He’s not dumb. Skinned, he’s like a man. People
Say that both bears and men receive a signal
Coming from far up there, near the North Pole.
WHEN MY DEAD FATHER CALLED
Last night I dreamt my father called to us.
He was stuck somewhere. It took us
A long time to dress, I don’t know why.
The night was snowy; there were long black roads.
Finally, we reached the little town, Bellingham.
There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,
Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed
The uneven sort of shoes that men wore
In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.
Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps
He left us somewhere once, or did I simply
Forget he was alone in winter in some town?
III
THE GREEN COOKSTOVE
A lonely man once sat on a large flat stone.
When he lifted it, he saw a kitchen: a green
Enamel range with big claw feet, familiar.
Someone lives in that room, cooking and cackling.
“I saw her once,” Virgil said. “She and Helen
Were sisters.” Menelaus
Sits by the window, peeling garlic cloves,
And throwing bread crusts to the chickens.
We’ll never understand this. Somewhere below
The flat stone of the skull, a carnivorous couple
Lives and plans future wars. Are we innocent?
These wars don’t happen by accident—they occur
Too regularly. How often do we lift the plate
At the bottom of our brain and throw some garlic
And grain down to the kitchen? “Keep cooking,
My dears,” we say. “Something good will come of this.”
THE PLAYFUL DEEDS OF THE WIND
Sometimes there’s the wind. Sometimes the wind
Takes a certain scrap of paper, and blows
It back into the Bible. Then your family line
Is whole, and your great-great-grandparents
Stretch out in the coffin, and rest. That’s something
Wind can do. Sometimes wind blows
A skirt up an inch or two, and the body
Signs a contract for its novel; then babies
Come, and people sit at breakfast, and the old
Words get spoken. Or the wind blows an ash
Into the anarchist’s eye, and he pulls
The trigger too soon, and kills the King instead of
The fat factory owner, and then
A lot of men get on motorcycles. They
Dig trenches, and the wind blows the gas
Here and there, and you and I get nothing
Out of that wind except blind uncles
And a boy at the table who can’t say “Please.”
IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE IN
I have been thinking about the man who gives in.
Have you heard about him? In his story
A twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small wind
And the pine bends all the way over to the ground.
“I was persuaded,” the pine says. “It was convincing.”
A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agrees
To drown all her children. “What could I do?”
The cat said. “The mouse needed that.”
It’s strange. I’ve heard that some people conspire
Deserve to live.” The man says, “I’ll string this rope
Over that branch, maybe you can find a box.”
The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,
“I need twenty thousand corpses.” “Tell you what,”
The General says, “we have an extra battalion
Over there on the hill. We don’t need all these men.”
WANTING MORE APPLAUSE AT A CONFERENCE
It’s something about envy. I won’t say I’m envious,
But I did have certain moods when I was two.
Now of course I can’t remember any of that.
I’m happy if another receives some praise or attention
That’s really mine. I talk, and the man next to me
Talks, and he gets the applause. Or I am confused
And she makes sense. This is hard to bear.
I bear it, but it causes trouble inside the den.
Is it a mammal problem then? Six teats are palpable
Far inside the wiry fur, and I want more
Than one? Is that it? It is, but such greed
Is mainly a problem for small mammals,
And I am no longer small. Let’s call it a mood
When we can’t remember. Let’s call it a habit
Of opening the mouth when we, who have
Much, want more, even what belongs to the poor.
CALLING YOUR FATHER
There was a boy who never got enough.
You know what I mean. Something
In him longed to find the big
Mother, and he leaped into the sea.
It took a while, but a whale
Agreed to swallow him.
He knew it was wrong, but once
Past the baleen, it was too late.
It’s OK. There’s a curved library
Inside, and those high
Ladders. People take requests.
It’s like the British Museum.
One needs a fire to get out.
Maybe it was the romance
Novels he burned. Smoke curls
Up the whale’s gorge. She coughs.
And that’s it. The boy swims to shore;
It’s a fishing town in Alaska.
He calls his father. “I’m here.
Let me tell you a story.”
THINKING ABOUT OLD JOBS
Well, let’s say this morning is all of life there is—
Let’s suppose the weather (rainy), the room
(Creamy-walled), the bed (soft), your cells (calm,
Excitable and dense) are it. Don’t expect more.
Then what? Does it matter how you chose
To live at twenty? You felt detached, let’s say,
So you blew your legs and arms off.
Why feel bad? It helped in some ways.
You had more solitude, because friends avoid stumps.
Of course you had to live. You started picking
Other people’s cucumbers with your teeth,
As you lay flat on a board. Don’t be ashamed.
It was a deal. It worked. The boss’s children
Later sent
you back the canceled contract.
Then remember the job you had lying about
Your health to life insurance companies?
Or performing as a Santa in Depression wards?
All those jobs were all right. But that time is over.
Am I content? I am. But we don’t
Have to live in the way we did then: Let’s talk.
CONVERSATION WITH A MONSTER
A man I knew could never say who he was.
You know people like that. When he met a monster,
He’d encourage the monster to talk about eating
But failed to say that he objected to being prey.
A day goes by; a week; a month; it’s summer.
The adolescent wolverines go out scouting;
Crabs lift their claws; the praying mantises
Get religious. This man keeps trying to adapt.