valley where our journey began.
But a brightening intelligence
was on his face. Insight moved him
as he once was moved by daylight.
The best teachers teach more
than they know. By their deaths
they teach most. They lead us beyond
what we know, and what they knew.
Thus my teacher, my old friend,
stood smiling now before me, wholly
moved by what had moved him partly
in the world.
Again the host of the dead
encircled us, as in a dance.
And I was aware now of the unborn
moving among them. As they turned
I could see their bodies come to light
and fade again in the dark throng.
They moved as to a distant or a hovering
song I strained for, but could not hear.
“Our way is endless,” my teacher said.
“The Creator is divided in Creation
for the joys of recognition. We knew
that Spirit in each other once;
it brings us here. By its divisions
and returns, the world lives.
Both mind and earth are made
of what its light gives and uses up.
So joy contains, survives its cost.
The dead abide, as grief knows.
We are what we have lost.”
There is a song in the Creation;
it has always been the gift
of every gifted voice, though none
ever sang it. As he spoke
I heard that song. In its changes and returns
his life was passing into life.
That moment, earth and song and mind,
the living and the dead, were one.
8.
At last, completed in his rest,
as one who has worked and bathed, fed
and loved and slept, he let fall
the beloved earth that I had brought him.
He raised his hand, turned me to my way.
And I, inheritor of what I mourned,
went back toward the light of day.
RISING
for Kevin Flood
1.
Having danced until nearly
time to get up, I went on
in the harvest, half lame
with weariness. And he
took no notice, and made
no mention of my distress.
He went ahead, assuming
that I would follow. I followed,
dizzy, half blind, bitter
with sweat in the hot light.
He never turned his head,
a man well known by his back
in those fields in those days.
He led me through long rows
of misery, moving like a dancer
ahead of me, so elated
he was, and able, filled
with desire for the ground’s growth.
We came finally to the high
still heat of four o’clock,
a long time before sleep.
And then he stood by me
and looked at me as I worked,
just looked, so that my own head
uttered his judgment, even
his laughter. He only said:
“That social life don’t get
down the row, does it, boy?”
2.
I worked by will then, he
by desire. What was ordeal
for me, for him was order
and grace, ideal and real.
That was my awkward boyhood,
the time of his mastery.
He troubled me to become
what I had not thought to be.
3.
The boy must learn the man
whose life does not travel
along any road, toward
any other place,
but is a journey back and forth
in rows, and in the rounds
of years. His journey’s end
is no place of ease, but the farm
itself, the place day labor
starts from journeys in,
returns to: the fields
whose past and potency are one.
4.
And that is our story,
not of time, but the forever
returning events of light,
ancient knowledge seeking
its new minds. The man at dawn
in spring of the year,
going to the fields,
visionary of seed and desire,
is timeless as a star.
5.
Any man’s death could end the story:
his mourners, having accompanied him
to the grave through all he knew,
turn back, leaving him complete.
But this is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.
For those who depart from it, bearing it
in their minds, the grave is a beginning.
It has weighted the earth with sudden
new gravity, the enrichment of pain.
There is a grave, too, in each
survivor. By it, the dead one lives.
He enters us, a broken blade,
sharp, clear as a lens or a mirror.
And he comes into us helpless, tender
as the newborn enter the world. Great
is the burden of our care. We must be true
to ourselves. How else will he know us?
Like a wound, grief receives him.
Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep
as part of ourselves the severe gift.
By grief, more inward than darkness,
the dead become the intelligence of life.
Where the tree falls the forest rises.
There is nowhere to stand but in absence,
no life but in the fateful night.
6.
Ended, a story is history;
it is in time, with time
lost. But if a man’s life
continue in another man,
then the flesh will rhyme
its part in immortal song.
By absence, he comes again.
There is a kinship of the fields
that gives to the living the breath
of the dead. The earth
opened in the spring, opens
in all springs. Nameless,
ancient, many-lived, we reach
through ages with the seed.
II
DESOLATION
A gracious Spirit sings as it comes
and goes. It moves forever
among things. Earth and flesh, passing
into each other, sing together.
Turned against that song, we go
where no singing is or light
or need coupled with its yes,
but spite, despair, fear, and loneliness.
Unless the solitary will forbear,
time enters the flesh to sever
passion from all care,
annul the lineage of consequence.
Unless the solitary will forbear,
the blade enters the ground
to tear the world’s comfort
out, root and crown.
THE STRAIT
1.
The valley holds its shadow.
My loves lie round me in the dark.
Through the woods on the hilltop
I see one distant light, a star
that seems to sway and flicker
as the trees move. I see the flight
of men crossing and crossing
the blank curve of heaven. I hear
the branches clashing in the wind.
2.
I have come to the end
of what I have supposed,
following my thread of song.
Who knows where it is going?
I am well acquainted now
among the dead. Only the past
knows me. In solitude
who will teach me?
3.
The world’s one song is passing
in and out of deaths, as thrush notes
move in the shadows, nearer and nearer,
and then away, intent, in the hollows
of the woods. It does not attend
the dead, or what will die. It is light
though it goes in the dark. It goes
ahead, summoning. What hears follows.
4.
Sitting among the bluebells
in my sorrow, for lost time
and the never forgotten dead,
I saw a hummingbird stand
in air to drink from flowers.
It was a kiss he took and gave.
At his lightness and the ardor
of his throat, the song I live by
stirred my mind. I said:
“By sweetness alone it survives.”
THE LAW THAT MARRIES ALL THINGS
1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.
The rain is free
only in falling.
The water is free only
in its gathering together,
in its rising into air.
2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.
3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.
It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division.
4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.
5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.
Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.
SETTING OUT
for Gurney Norman
Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the Long Hunter, and set out
not to the familiar woods of home
but to the forest of the night,
the true wilderness, where renewal
is found, the lay of the ground
a premonition of the unknown.
Blowing leaf and flying wren
lead him on. He can no longer be at home,
he cannot return, unless he begin
the circle that first will carry him away.
SONG (1)
In ignorance of the source, our want
affirms abundance in these days.
Truth keeps us though we do not know it.
O Spirit, our desolation is your praise.
FROM THE DISTANCE
1.
We are others and the earth,
the living of the dead.
Remembering who we are,
we live in eternity;
any solitary act
is work of community.
2.
All times are one
if heart delight
in work, if hands
join the world right.
3.
The wheel of eternity is turning
in time, its rhymes, austere,
at long intervals returning,
sing in the mind, not in the ear.
4.
A man of faithful thought may feel
in light, among the beasts and fields,
the turning of the wheel.
5.
Fall of the year:
at evening a frail mist
rose, glowing in the rain.
The dead and unborn drew near
the fire. A song, not mine,
stuttered in the flame.
III
LETTER
1.
To search for what belongs where it is,
for what, scattered, might come together,
I leave you, my mold, my cup;
I flow from your bonds, a stream risen
over the hold of its stones.
2.
Turning always in my mind toward you,
your slopes, folds, gentle openings
on which I would rest my song
like an open hand, I know the trials of absence,
comely lives I must pass by, not to return,
beauties I will not know in satisfaction,
but in the sharp clarity of desire.
3.
In place with you, as I come and go
I pass the thread of my song again
and again through the web of my life
and the lives of the dead before me,
the old resounding in the new.
Now in the long curve of a journey
I spin a single stand, carried away
by what must bring me home.
RETURNING
I was walking in a dark valley
and above me the tops of the hills
had caught the morning light.
I heard the light singing as it went
among the grassblades and the leaves.
I waded upward through the shadow
until my head emerged,
my shoulders were mantled with the light,
and my whole body came up
out of the darkness, and stood
on the new shore of the day.
for my own house stood white
where the dark river wore the earth.
The sheen of bounty was on the grass,
and the spring of the year had come.
TO TANYA AT CHRISTMAS
Forgive me, my delight,
that grief and loneliness
have kept me. Though I come
to you in darkness, you are
companion of the light
that rises on all I know.
In the long night of the year
and of the spirit, God’s birth
is met with simple noise.
Deaf and blind in division,
I reach, and do not find.
You show the gentler way:
We come to good by love;
our words must be made flesh.
And flesh must be made word
at last, our lives rise
in speech to our children’s tongues.
They will tell how we once stood
together here, two trees
whose lives in annual sheddings
made their way into this ground,
whose bodies turned to earth
and song. The song will tell
how old love sweetens the fields.
SONG (2)
My gentle hill, I rest
beside you in the dark
in a place warmed by my body,
where by ardor, grace, work,
and loss, I belong.
IV
THE RIVER BRIDGED AND FORGOT
Who can impair thee, mighty King
Bridged and forgot, the river
in unwearying descent
carries down the soil
of ravaged uplands, waste
and acid from the strip mines,
poisons of our false
prosperity. What mind
regains of clarity
mourns, the current a slow
cortege of everything
that we have given up,
the materials of Creation
wrecked, the strewed substance
of our trust and dignity.
But on still afternoons
of summer, the water’s face
recovers clouds, the shapes
of leaves. Maple, willow,
sycamore stand light
and easy in their weight,
their branching forms formed
on the water, and yellow
warbler, swallow, oriole
stroke their deft flight
through the river’s serene reflection
of the sky, as though, corrupted,
it shows the incorrupt.
Is this memory or promise?
And what is grief beside it?
What is anger beside it?
It is unfinished. It will not
be finished. And a man’s life
will be, although his work
will not, nor his desire
for clarity. Beside
this dark passage of water
I make my work, lifework
of many lives that has
no end, for it takes circles
of years, of birth and death
for pattern, eternal form
visible in mystery.
It takes for pattern the heavenly
and earthly song of which
it is a part, which holds it
from despair: the joined voices
of all things, all muteness
vocal in their harmony.
For that, though none can hear
or sing it all, though I
must by nature fail,
my work has turned away
the priced infinity
of mechanical desire.
This work that many loves
inspire teaches the mind
resemblance to the earth
in seasonal fashioning,
departures and returns
of song. The hands strive
against their gravity
for envisioned lights and forms,
fallings of harmony;
they strive, fail at their season’s
end. The seasonless river
lays hand and handiwork
upon the world, obedient
to a greater Mind, whole