Idea that the gods are dead.
You were so rash. I’d play saying
The gods have died, but I’d never say it.
If they’re gone, only Imagination
Can replace them. That’s you.
We’ll have to come to you, where
You stand in your Hartford garden,
Looking and lolling and longing
Like a girl in a white dress.
TASTING HEAVEN
Some people say that every poem should have
God in it somewhere. But of course Wallace Stevens
Wasn’t one of those. We live, he said, “in a world
Without heaven to follow.” Shall we agree
That we taste heaven only once, when we see
Her at fifteen walking among falling leaves?
It’s possible. And yet as Stevens lay dying
He invited the priest in. There, I’ve said it.
The priest is not an argument, only an instance.
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have
Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies
Are left over from some larger party.
WALLACE STEVENS IN THE FOURTH GRADE
Where a voice that is great within us rises up,
As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.
—Wallace Stevens
In the fourth grade he sat on his school bench
Daydreaming. He was already admiring his voice
That he hadn’t found. And later on the lawn
He spent hours standing at the edge of Hartford
Looking at the moon. That is where his voice was,
Far up there, in air, near the rounded moon.
He knew the moon was made of clogged magma,
And volcanic rinsings, and punk and dog poop.
That was all right. That was better. It was more
Like us. The rogue moon couldn’t hold God
Any longer; we’ll have to make do with waltzes,
And Florida and those prancing white horses.
There is no Divine; there are only Viennese horses,
And ordinary evenings and houses. Things have changed.
The boy on the bench can become in poems a god.
THE WALTZ
One man I know keeps saying that we don’t need
Heaven. He thinks embroidered Russian
Wedding blouses will take the place of angels,
Or windy nights when the crows fly up in front
Of your car will replace all the Psalmists.
He wants us to dance high-hearted, like the Bacchae,
Even if it’s a waltz. It’s a little awkward;
But if you practice, he says, you can do it.
The hard thing is to try to figure out how
To say goodbye—even just going to the grocery.
V
THE NEURONS WHO WATCH BIRDS
We have to think now what it would be like
To be old. Some funny little neurons,
Developed for high-speed runners, and quick-
Handed bowmen, begin to get tired. They fire
But then lay down their bows and watch birds.
The kidney cells—“Too much thinking!” the Chinese
Say—look around for help, but the kids have
All gone to the city. Your friends get hit by lightning,
And your enemies live on. This isn’t going to get
Better. Crows yelling from the telephone wires
Don’t include you in the stories they tell, and they seem
To remember some story that you haven’t heard.
What can you do? We’ll have to round up
All those little people wandering about
In the body, get them to sit up straight, and study
This problem: How do we die?
A QUESTION THE BUNDLE HAD
When summer was nearly over,
The bundles would stand in the stubble
Whispering. One said: “For a while,
It looked like I might get away.
“I could have done it—
No one would have noticed.
But it was hard to know
If I should go singly, or with others.”
Each of us resembles that
Bundle. For years we waited
For the right moment to escape.
Perhaps it was that moment in July
When the thunder came. But the next
Day it was too late. And we
Ended up in the thresher.
Were we right to wait?
SEEING THE ECLIPSE IN MAINE
It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,
We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard
And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun
Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.
It was hard to believe. The high school teacher
We’d met called it a camera obscura,
People in the Renaissance loved to make them.
Later, when only a sliver was left of the sun,
Light passing through the branches of a fir
Made dozens of crescents all by itself,
Thousands! Even our straw hats produced a few
As we moved them over the bare granite.
We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine
Told a joke. Suns were everywhere at our feet.
CLOTHESPINS
I’d like to have spent my life making
Clothespins. Nothing would be harmed,
Except some pines, probably on land
I owned and would replant. I’d see
My work on clotheslines near some lake,
Up north on a day in October,
Perhaps twelve clothespins, the pine
Still fresh, and the fall wind blowing.
THE FACE IN THE TOYOTA
Suppose you see a face in a Toyota
One day, and you fall in love with that face,
And it is Her, and the world rushes by
Like dust blown down a Montana street.
And you fall upward into some deep hole,
And you can’t tell God from a grain of sand.
And your life is changed, except that now you
Overlook even more than you did before;
And these ignored things come to bury you,
And you are crushed, and your parents
Can’t help anymore, and the woman in the Toyota
Becomes a part of the world that you don’t see.
And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,
And you stand on some mountain road weeping.
THE SCANDAL
The day the minister ran off with the choir director
The bindlestiffs felt some gaiety in their arms.
Spike-pitchers threw their bundles higher on the load
And the County Assessor drove with a tiny smile.
Actually the minister’s wife felt relieved that morning,
Though afraid too. She walked out by the slough,
And admired the beaver’s house, partly above
Water, partly beneath. That seemed right.
The minister felt dizzy as the two of them drove
For hours: country music and the loose ribbon
Mingled in his mind with the Song of Songs.
They stopped at a small motel near Bismarck.
For the threshers, the stubble was still dry,
The oat dust itchy, the big belt needed grease,
The loads pulled up to the machine. This story happens
Over and over, and it’s a good story.
LOOKING AT THE STARS
I still think about the shepherds, how many stars
They saw. We owe our love of God to these sheep
That had to be followed, or companioned, all night.
One can’t just let them run. By midnight
The stars had already become huge talkers.
The Par
ent sits in her proud Chair, and is punished.
The Dog follows the Hunter. Each time a story ends
There is such a long pause before another begins.
Those of us who are parents, and getting older,
Long, as tonight, for our children to stand
With us, looking at the stars. Here it is,
Eight thousand years later, and I still remember.
AFTER A FRIEND’S DEATH
For Orrin
It must be summer. Push the dock out,
Bring the canoe down, find your old
Books—bird books, Hawthorne. Drive
To Gooseberry. Even in the Swedish islands,
Summer comes. They pull the linen off chairs,
Bring out the blue dishes, write some poems.
Say again: “It must be summer.”
Even though people die, it must be summer.
THE PARCEL
It’s a parcel of some sort. The exchange
Takes place at night. Sometimes
Dark spots show on the brown wrapping paper,
Because rain was falling.
It happened. The two had met each other only
Yesterday. Neither had read many novels;
They didn’t plot this. It had something to do with the planets,
With destiny, with rain.
Because it happened, certain gates were shut;
A door opened. Children were born; one died.
How could we call it innocent? The rain
Was innocent.
Do you remember the night of that exchange?
Some forces wanted this to happen.
The rain didn’t care, but no one else
Was innocent.
MY DOUBTS ON GOING TO VISIT A NEW FRIEND
I’m glad that a white horse grazes in that meadow
Outside your kitchen window; even when it rains
There’s still someone there. And it rains often
In the mountains.
I have to ask myself what kind of friend I can be.
You’ll want to know whether I do dishes,
Or know my share of stories, or any Wallace
Stevens poems by heart.
I know that I won’t talk all the time, or steal
Money, or complain about my room,
Or undermine you, or speak disparagingly
Of your family.
I am afraid there’ll be a moment when
I fail you, friend; I will turn slightly
Away, our eyes will not meet, and out in the field
There will be no one.
For John
ONE SOURCE OF BAD INFORMATION
There’s a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.
This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”
You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want
To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.
THOUGHTS
There’s something dangerous
In being with good talkers.
The fly’s stories of his ancestors
Don’t mean much to the frog.
I can’t be the noisy person I am
If you don’t stop talking.
Some people talk so brilliantly
That we get small and vanish.
The shadows near that Dutch woman
Tell you that Rembrandt is a good listener.
THE GRANDPARENT AND THE GRANDDAUGHTER
“Will you rescue her?” We have dreams like that
When a grandchild is about to be born.
We’re called upon and we have to help.
I dreamt that a baby had fallen off a cliff
Into the water. The baby’s mouth was opening
And closing. I climbed fast, hand over
Hand down to the shore and pulled her in.
She was all right! That’s how I did my part.
THE OCEAN RISING AND FALLING
Each fall it rains a lot in the northern woods.
Many parts of our brain hear the rain;
And one part says, “Oh good. Let’s sleep.”
Another says, “A visitor is coming. It’s
A sign!” The oldest brain says: “If that person
Doesn’t look like us, we’ll stone him.” I guess
It’s family. The cedar trees mutter,
“About time.” Some forest streams
Are amazed to be noticed. Rivers, the big ones, are sure
Attention, being past all that. The ocean just
Goes up and down saying, “I need no more.”
OCEAN RAIN AND MUSIC
Rain falls on the shore bushes and the pawky sea
Lettuce, as if it were rain from some other century,
Rain that arrived with the sailing ships,
A steady rain that came out of the Indian Ocean
Along with so much music. Well then, since I speak
So affectionately, is it music that has saved me?
Did music become my mother? Music cannot
Close doors, nor keep murderers out.
Some children need to be safe, but most aren’t.
Children get born in our world, but who protects them?
A few find gypsy wagons and hide there.
The tribe steals them away, and they are gone, for now.
I thought to leave with a gypsy troupe in my twenties.
Someone did take me away. I had heard
Rumors of heroism. Yeats stole me away.
We leave family and community and never
Get back. But one has to get used to being stolen.
And there are certain secrets that stolen children know.
VI
LOOKING AT AGING FACES
Some faces get older and remain who they are. Oh
You can see disappointment there, where parent-teacher
Meetings have affected the chin; or the nose got pushed
To one side by deaths. So many things happen:
People move away, or your mother becomes crazy
And bites the nurse.
Each face had a long time in the womb to decide
How much it would let worldly things affect it,
How often it would turn toward the wall or the woods,
So it didn’t have to be seen, how much
It would give in, how stubbornly it would
Hold its own.
Some faces remain whole and radiant. We study them
To find a clue. Aunt Nettie said, “My father
Put on cufflinks every day.” Memories like that
Help. One face, as firmly profiled as a hawk,
Used to say: “The world is fair, and if it’s not,
I think it is.”
For some of us, insults sink in, or the feet
Inherit two roads and lose the way; for others, cold
And hunger come. Some faces change. It’s not wrong.
And if you look carefully, you can see,
By glimpsing us just after we wake,
Who we are.
For Bill and Nancy
NOVEMBER
Some aggravations include the whole world.
What can you do? An old pulp-cutter
Longs to die, imagines
The Easter nails.
On his Icelandic farm, Guttorm hears
The news: his two sons
Dead. He pulls the covers
Up over his head.
Some oak leaves hang, others f
all.
The body says, “It’s all right
To die. It’s not an insult
To the world.”
THREE-DAY FALL RAIN
The three-day
October rain blows
Leaves down. We knew
That life wouldn’t last long.
The dock gleams
With oak leaves, cold
Leaves in the boat, leaves
Spotted in the old man grass.
Hardy warned
Us. Jesus in his boat,
Standing, his back turned,
Being rowed to the other shore.
WINTER AFTERNOON BY THE LAKE
For Owen
Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,