Now the lights from barn windows can be seen through bare trees.
APPROACHING WINTER
I
September. Clouds. The first day for wearing jackets.
The corn is wandering in dark corridors,
Near the well and the whisper of tombs.
II
I sit alone surrounded by dry corn,
Near the second growth of the pigweeds,
And hear the corn leaves scrape their feet on the wind.
III
Fallen ears are lying on the dusty earth.
The useful ears will dry in cribs, but the others, missed
By the picker, will lie here touching the ground the whole winter.
IV
Snow will come, and cover the husks of the fallen ears
With flakes, infinitely delicate, like jewels of a murdered Gothic prince
Which were lost centuries ago during a great battle.
DRIVING TOWARD THE LAC QUI PARLE RIVER
I
I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.
The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.
The soybeans are breathing on all sides.
Old men are sitting before their houses on carseats
In the small towns. I am happy,
The moon rising above the turkey sheds.
II
The small world of the car
Plunges through the deep fields of the night,
On the road from Willmar to Milan.
This solitude covered with iron
Moves through the fields of night
Penetrated by the noise of crickets.
III
Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,
And water kneeling in the moonlight.
In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;
The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass.
When I reach the river, the full moon covers it;
A few people are talking low in a boat.
POEM IN THREE PARTS
I
Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.
II
Rising from a bed, where I dreamt
Of long rides past castles and hot coals,
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night
Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.
III
The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.
AWAKENING
UNREST
A strange unrest hovers over the nation:
This is the last dance, the wild tossing of Morgan’s seas,
The division of spoils.
A lassitude enters into the diamonds
Of the body. In high school the explosion begins,
The child is partly killed. When the fight is over,
And the land and the sea
Ruined, two shapes inside us rise, and move away.
But the baboon whistles on the shores of death—
Climbing and falling, tossing nuts and stones,
He gambols by the tree
Whose branches hold the expanses of cold,
The planets whirling and the black sun,
The cries of insects, and the tiny slaves
In the prisons of bark:
Charlemagne, we are approaching your islands!
We are returning now to the snowy trees,
Charlemagne, through which you rode all night
With stiff hands. Now
The darkness is falling, in which we sleep
And wake, a darkness in which thieves shudder
And the insane have a hunger for snow,
And stiff-faced men like me
Fall on their knees in the dungeons of sleep.
AWAKENING
We are approaching sleep: the chestnut blossoms in the mind
Mingle with thoughts of pain,
And the long roots of barley, bitterness
As of the oak roots staining the water dark
In Louisiana, the wet streets soaked with rain
And sodden blossoms, out of this
We have come, a tunnel softly hurtling into darkness.
The storm is coming. The small farmhouse in Minnesota
Is hardly strong enough for the storm.
Darkness, darkness in the grasses, darkness in trees.
Even the water in wells trembles.
Bodies give off darkness, and chrysanthemums
Are dark, and horses, who are bearing great loads of hay
To the deep barns where the dark air is moving from the corners.
Lincoln’s statue, and the traffic. From the long past
Into the long present
A bird forgotten in these pressures, warbling,
As the great wheel turns around, grinding
The living in water.
Washing, continual washing, in water now stained
With blossoms and rotting logs, cries half-
Muffled, from beneath the earth, the living finally as awake as the dead.
POEM AGAINST THE RICH
Each day I live, each day the sea of light
Rises, I seem to see
The tear inside the stone
As if my eyes were gazing beneath the earth.
The rich man in his red hat
Cannot hear
The weeping in the pueblos of the lily,
Or the dark tears in the shacks of the corn.
Each day the sea of light rises
I hear the sad rustle of the darkened armies,
Where each man weeps, and the plaintive
Orisons of the stones.
The stones bow as the saddened armies pass.
POEM AGAINST THE BRITISH
I
The wind through the box-elder trees
Is like rides at dusk on a white horse,
Wars for your country, and fighting the British.
II
I wonder if Washington listened to the trees.
All morning I have been sitting in grass,
Higher than my eyes, beneath trees,
And listening upward, to the wind in leaves.
Suddenly I realize there is one thing more:
There is also the wind through the high grass.
III
There are palaces, boats, silence among white buildings,
Iced drinks on marble tops, among cool rooms;
It is good also to be poor, and listen to the wind.
WHERE WE MUST LOOK FOR HELP
The dove returns; it found no resting place;
It was in flight all night above the shaken seas.
Beneath Ark eaves
The dove shall magnify the tiger’s bed;
Give the dove peace.
The split-tail swallows leave the sill at dawn;
At dusk blue swallows shall return.
On the third day the crow shall fly;
The crow, the crow, the spider-colored crow,
The crow shall find new mud to walk upon.
REMEMBERING IN OSLO THE OLD PICTURE OF THE MAGNA CARTA
The girl in a housedress, pushing open the window,
Is also the fat king sitting under the oak tree,
And the garbagemen, thumping their cans, are
Crows still cawing,
And the nobles are offering the sheet to the king.
One thing is also another thing, and the doomed galleons,
Hung with trinkets, hove by the coast, and in the blossoms
Of trees are still sailing on their long voyage from Spain;
I too am still shocking grain, as I did as a boy, dog tired,
And my great-grandfather steps on his ship.
SUMMER, 1960, MINNESOTA
I
After a drifting day, visiting the bridge near Louisburg,
With its hot muddy water flowing
Under the excited swallows,
Now, at noon,
We plunge through the hot beanfields,
And the sturdy alfalfa fields, the farm groves
Like heavy green smoke close to the ground.
II
Inside me there is a confusion of swallows,
Birds flying through the smoke,
And horses galloping excitedly on fields of short grass.
III
Yet, we are falling,
Falling into the open mouths of darkness,
Into the Congo as if into a river,
Or as wheat into open mills.
WITH PALE WOMEN IN MARYLAND
With pale women in Maryland,
Passing the proud and tragic pastures,
And stupefied with love
And the stupendous burdens of the foreign trees,
As all before us lived, dazed
With overabundant love in the reach of the Chesapeake,
Past the tobacco warehouse, through our dark lives
Like those before, we move to the death we love
With pale women in Maryland.
DRIVING THROUGH OHIO
I
We slept that night in Delaware, Ohio:
A magnificent and sleepy country,
Oak country, sheep country, sod country.
We slept in a huge white tourist home
With National Geographics on the table.
II
North of Columbus there is a sort of torpid joy:
The slow and muddy river,
The white barns leaning into the ground,
Cottonwoods with their trunks painted white,
And houses with small observatories on top,
As if Ohio were the widow’s coast, looking over
The dangerous Atlantic.
III
Now we drive north past the white cemeteries
So rich in the morning air!
All morning I have felt the sense of death;
I am full of love, and love this torpid land.
Someday I will go back, and inhabit again
The sleepy ground where Harding was born.
AT THE FUNERAL OF GREAT-AUNT MARY
I
Here we are, all dressed up to honor death!
No, it is not that;
It is to honor this old woman
Born in Bellingham.
II
The church windows are open to the green trees.
The minister tells us that, being
The sons and daughters of God,
We rejoice at death, for we go
To the mansions prepared
From the foundations of the world.
Impossible. No one believes it.
III
Out in the bare, pioneer field,
The frail body must wait till dusk
To be lowered
In the hot and sandy earth.
ON THE FERRY ACROSS CHESAPEAKE BAY
On the orchard of the sea, far out are whitecaps,
Water that answers questions no one has asked,
Silent speakers of the grave’s rejoinders;
Having accomplished nothing, I am traveling somewhere else;
O deep green sea, it is not for you
This smoking body plows toward death;
It is not for the strange blossoms of the sea
I drag my thin legs across the Chesapeake Bay;
Though perhaps by your motion the body heals;
For though on its road the body cannot march
With golden trumpets—it must march—
And the sea gives up its answers as it falls into itself.
A MAN WRITES TO A PART OF HIMSELF
What cave are you in, hiding, rained on?
Like a wife, starving, without care,
Water dripping from your head, bent
Over ground corn . . .
You raise your face into the rain
That drives across the valley.
Forgive me, your husband,
On the streets of a distant city, laughing,
With many appointments,
Though at night going also
To a bare room, a room of poverty,
To sleep beside a bare pitcher and basin
In a room with no heat—
Which of us two then is the worse off?
And how did this separation come about?
DEPRESSION
I felt my heart beat like an engine high in the air,
Like those scaffolding engines standing only on planks;
Useless, clogged, full of blackened wheat.
My body was sour, my life dishonest, and I fell asleep.
I dreamt that men came toward me, carrying thin wires;
I felt the wires pass in; they were old Tibetans,
Dressed in padded clothes, to keep out cold;
Then three work gloves, lying fingers to fingers,
In a circle, came toward me, and I awoke.
Now I want to go back among the dark roots;
Now I want to see the day pulling its long wing;
I want to see nothing more than two feet high;
I want to see no one, I want to say nothing,
I want to go down and rest in the black earth of silence.
DRIVING TO TOWN LATE TO MAIL A LETTER
It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.
GETTING UP EARLY
I am up early. The box-elder leaves have fallen.
The eastern sky is the color of March.
The sky has spread out over the world like water.
The bootlegger and his wife are still asleep.
I saw the light first from the barn well.
The cold water fell into the night-chilled buckets,
Deepening the somber blue of the southern sky.
Over the new trees, there was a strange light in the east.
The light was dawn. Like a man who has come home
After seeing many dark rivers, and will soon go again,
The dawn stood there with a quiet gaze;
Our eyes met through the top leaves of the young ash.
Dawn has come. The clouds floating in the east have turned white.
The fenceposts have stopped being a part of the darkness.
The depth has disappeared from the puddles on the ground.
I look up angrily at the light.
A LATE SPRING DAY IN MY LIFE
A silence hovers over the earth:
The grass lifts lightly in the heat
Like the ancient wing of a bird.
A horse gazes steadily at me.
LOVE POEM
When we are in love, we love the grass,
And the barns, and the lightpoles,
And the small mainstreets abandoned all night.
“TAKING THE HANDS”
Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages . . .
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hands.
AFTERNOON SLEEP
I
I was descending from the mountains of sleep.
Asleep I had gazed east over a sunny field,
And sat on the running board of an old Model A.
I awoke happy, for I had dreamt of my wife,
And the loneliness hiding in grass and weeds
That lies near
a man over thirty, and suddenly enters.
II
When Joe Sjolie grew tired, he sold his farm,
Even his bachelor rocker, and did not come back.
He left his dog behind in the cob shed.
The dog refused to take food from strangers.
III
I drove out to that farm when I awoke;
Alone on a hill, sheltered by trees.
The matted grass lay around the house.
When I climbed the porch, the door was open.
Inside were old abandoned books,
And instructions to Norwegian immigrants.
IMAGES SUGGESTED BY MEDIEVAL MUSIC
For Margaret and Joseph Scheinin
“A thousand singing herons I saw passing
Flying overhead, sounding a thousand voices
Exulting: Glory be in the heavens,” etc.
I
Once more in Brooklyn Heights
A child is born, and it has no father,
And it is right to rejoice: our past life appears
As a wake behind us, and we plunge on into the sea of pain.
II
I have felt this joy before, it is like the harsh grasses
On lonely beaches, this strange sweetness
Of medieval music, a hoarse joy,