Thinking of what may come,
I wake up in the night
and cannot go back to sleep.
The future swells in the dark,
too large a room for one
man to sleep well in.
I think of the work at hand.
Before spring comes again
there is another pasture
to clear and sow, for an end
I desire but cannot know.
Now in the silent keep
of stars and of my work
I lay me down to sleep.
2.
The deepest sleep holds us
to something immutable.
We have fallen
into place, and harmony
surrounds us. We are carried
in the world, in the company
of stars. But as dawn comes
I feel the waking of my hunger
for another day. I weave
round it again the kindling
tapestry of desire.
3.
My life’s wave is at its crest.
The thought of work becomes
a friend of the thought of rest.
I see how little avail
one man is, and yet I would not
be a man sitting still,
no little song of desire
traveling the mind’s dark woods.
I am trying to teach my mind
to bear the long, slow growth
of the fields, and to sing
of its passing while it waits.
The farm must be made a form,
endlessly bringing together
heaven and earth, light
and rain building, dissolving,
building back again
the shapes and actions of the ground.
If it is to be done,
not of the body, not of the will
the strength will come,
but of delight that moves
lovers in their loves,
that moves the sun and stars,
that stirs the leaf, and lifts
the hawk in flight.
From the crest of the wave
the grave is in sight,
the soul’s last deep track
in the known. Past there
it gives up roof and fire,
board, bed, and word.
It returns to the wild,
where nothing is done by hand.
I am trying to teach
my mind to accept the finish
that all good work must have:
of hands touching me,
days and weathers passing
over me, the smooth of love,
the wearing of the earth.
At the final stroke
I will be a finished man.
4.
Little farm, motherland, made
by what has nearly been your ruin,
when I speak to you, I speak
to myself, for we are one
body. When I speak to you,
I speak to wife, daughter, son,
whom you have fleshed in your flesh.
And speaking to you, I speak
to all that brotherhood that rises
daily in your substance
and walks, burrows, flies, stands:
plants and beasts whose lives
loop like dolphins through your sod.
5.
Going into the city, coming
home again, I keep you
always in my mind.
Who knows me who does not
know you? The crowds of the streets
do not know that you
are passing among them with me.
They think I am simply a man,
made of a job and clothes
and education. They do not
see who is with me,
or know the resurrection
by which we have come
from the dead. In the city
we must be seemly and quiet
as becomes those who travel
among strangers. But do not
on that account believe
that I am ashamed
to acknowledge you, my friend.
We will write them a poem
to tell them of the great
membership, the mystic order,
to which both of us belong.
6.
When I think of death I see
that you are but a passing thought
poised upon the ground,
held in place
by vision, love, and work,
all as passing as a thought.
7.
Beginning and end
thread these fields like a net.
Nosing and shouldering,
the field mouse pats
his anxious routes through the grass,
the mole his cool ones
among the roots; the air
is tensely woven of bird flight,
fluttery at night with bats;
the mind of the honeybee
is the map of bloom.
Like a man, the farm is headed
for the woods. The wild
is already veined in it
everywhere, its thriving.
To love these things one did not
intend is to be a friend
to the beginning and the end.
8.
And when we speak together,
love, our words rise
like leaves, out of our fallen
words. What we have said
becomes an earth we live on
like two trees, whose sheddings
enrich each other, making
both the source of each.
When we love, the green
stalks and downturned bells
of lilies grow from our flesh.
Dreams and visions flower
from those beds our bodies are.
9.
The farm travels in snow,
a little world flying
through the Milky Way.
The flakes all fall
into place. But already
the mind begins to shift
its light, clearing space
to receive anew the old fate
of spring. In all the fields
and woods, old work calls
to new. The dead and living
prepare again to mate.
10.
Let the great song come
that sways the branches, that weaves
the nest of the vireo,
that the ground squirrel dreams
in his deep sleep, and wakes,
that the fish hear, that pipes
the minnows over
the shoals. In snow I wait
and sing of the braided
song I only partly hear.
Even in the rising year,
even in the spring,
the little can hope to sing
only in praise of the great.
A PART
(1980)
To my mother, who gave me books
STAY HOME
I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.
I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.
TO GARY SNYDER
After we saw the wild ducks
and walked away, drawing out
the quiet that had held us,
in wonder of them and of ourselves,
Den said, “I wish Mr. Snyder
had been here.” And I sa
id, “Yes.”
But it cannot be often as it was
when we heard geese in the air
and ran out of the house to see them
wavering in long lines, high,
southward, out of sight.
By division we speak, out of wonder.
FOR THE HOG KILLING
Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the eye,
let them die while the sound of the shot is in the air, let them die as they fall,
let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let its freshet be full,
let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around,
for today we celebrate again our lives’ wedding with the world,
for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond.
GOODS
It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.
THE ADZE
I came out to the barn lot
near nightfall, past supper time,
where he stood at work still
with the adze, that had to be
finely used or it would wound
the user—a lean old man
whose passion was to know
what a man could do in a day
and how a tool empowered the hand.
He paused to warn: stay back
from what innocence made dangerous.
I stayed back, and he went on
with what he had to do
while dark fell round him.
THE COLD PANE
Between the living world
and the world of death
is a clear, cold pane;
a man who looks too close
must fog it with his breath,
or hold his breath too long.
FALLING ASLEEP
Raindrops on the tin roof.
What do they say?
We have all
Been here before.
A PURIFICATION
At start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter’s accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.
A DANCE
The stepping-stones, once
in a row along the slope,
have drifted out of line,
pushed by frosts and rains.
Walking is no longer thoughtless
over them, but alert as dancing,
as tense and poised, to step
short, and long, and then
longer, right, and then left.
At the winter’s end, I dance
the history of its weather.
THE FEAR OF LOVE
I come to the fear of love
as I have often come,
to what must be desired
and to what must be done.
Only love can quiet the fear
of love, and only love can save
from diminishment the love
that we must lose to have.
We stand as in an open field,
blossom, leaf, and stem,
rooted and shaken in our day,
heads nodding in the wind.
SEVENTEEN YEARS
They are here again,
the locusts I baited my lines with
in the summer we married.
The light is filled
with the song the ground exhales
once in seventeen years.
And we are here with the wear
and the knowledge of those years,
understanding the song
of locusts no better than then,
knowing the future no more than they
who give themselves so long
to the dark. What can we say,
who grow older in love?
Marriage is not made
but in dark time, in the rhymes,
the returns of song,
that mark time’s losses.
They open our eyes
to the dark, and we marry again.
5 / 29 / 74
TO WHAT LISTENS
I come to it again
and again, the thought of the wren
opening his song here
to no human ear—
no woman to look up,
no man to turn his head.
The farm will sink then
from all we have done and said.
Beauty will lie, fold
on fold, upon it. Foreseeing
love. But from the height
and distance of foresight,
how well I like it
as it is! The river shining,
the bare trees on the bank,
the house set snug
as a stone in the hill’s flank,
the pasture behind it green.
Its songs and loves throb
in my head till like the wren
I sing—to what listens—again.
WOODS
I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.
THE LILIES
Hunting them, a man must sweat, bear
the whine of a mosquito in his ear,
grow thirsty, tired, despair perhaps
of ever finding them, walk a long way.
He must give himself over to chance,
for they live beyond prediction.
He must give himself over to patience,
for they live beyond will. He must be led
along the hill as by a prayer.
If he finds them anywhere, he will find
a few, paired on their stalks,
at ease in the air as souls in bliss.
I found them here at first without hunting,
by grace, as all beauties are first found.
I have hunted and not found them here.
Found, unfound, they breathe their light
into the mind, year after year.
FORTY YEARS
Life is your privilege, not your belonging.
It is the loss of it, now, that you will be singing.
A MEETING
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been
?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
ANOTHER DESCENT
Through the weeks of deep snow
we walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.
But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes,
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.
BELOW
Above trees and rooftops
is the range of symbols:
banner, cross, and star;
air war, the mode of those
who live by symbols; the pure
abstraction of travel by air.
Here a spire holds up
an angel with trump and wings;
he’s in his element.
Another lifts a hand
with forefinger pointing up
to admonish that all’s not here.
All’s not. But I aspire
downward. Flyers embrace
the air, and I’m a man
who needs something to hug.
All my dawns cross the horizon
and rise, from underfoot.
What I stand for
is what I stand on.
THE STAR
Flying at night, above the clouds, all earthmarks spurned,
lost in Heaven, where peaceful entry must be earned,
I have no pleasure here, nothing to desire.
And then I see one light below there like a star.
THE HIDDEN SINGER
The gods are less
for their love of praise.
Above and below them all
is a spirit that needs
nothing but its own
wholeness,
its health and ours.
It has made all things
by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come
together—the seer
and the seen, the eater
and the eaten, the lover