a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,
and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle
and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy
with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings
of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between
history’s death upon the place and the trees that would
have come
I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.
THE FAMILIAR
The hand is risen from the earth,
the sap risen, leaf come back to branch,
bird to nest crotch. Beans lift
their heads up in the row. The known
returns to be known again. Going
and coming back, it forms its curves,
a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.
THE FARMER AMONG THE TOMBS
I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,
their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,
the bones imprisoned under them.
Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!
Pry open the vaults and the coffins
so the dead may nourish their graves
and go free, their acres traversed all summer
by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.
FOR THE REBUILDING OF A HOUSE
To know the inhabiting reasons
of trees and streams, old men
who shed their lives
on the world like leaves,
I watch them go.
And I go. I build
the place of my leaving.
The days arc into vision
like fish leaping, their shining
caught in the stream.
I watch them go
in homage and sorrow.
I build the place of my dream.
I build the place of my leaving
that the dark may come clean.
THE SPRINGS
In a country without saints or shrines
I know one who made his pilgrimage
to springs, where in his life’s dry years
his mind held on. Everlasting,
people called them, and gave them names.
The water broke into sounds and shinings
at the vein mouth, bearing the taste
of the place, the deep rock, sweetness
out of the dark. He bent and drank
in bondage to the ground.
RAIN
It is a day of the earth’s renewing without any man’s doing or
help.
Though I have fields I do not go out to work in them.
Though I have crops standing in rows I do not go out
to look at them or gather what has ripened or hoe the weeds
from the balks.
Though I have animals I stay dry in the house while they graze
in the wet.
Though I have buildings they stand closed under their roofs.
Though I have fences they go without me.
My life stands in place, covered, like a hayrick or a mushroom.
SLEEP
I love to lie down weary
under the stalk of sleep
growing slowly out of my head,
the dark leaves meshing.
TO KNOW THE DARK
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
WINTER NIGHT POEM FOR MARY
As I started home after dark
I looked into the sky and saw the new moon,
an old man with a basket on his arm.
He walked among the cedars in the bare woods.
They stood like guardians, dark
as he passed. He might have been singing,
or he might not. He might have been sowing
the spring flowers, or he might not. But I saw him
with his basket, going along the hilltop.
WINTER NIGHTFALL
The fowls speak and sing, settling for the night.
The mare shifts in the bedding.
In her womb her foal sleeps and grows,
meditative in the fragrance of timothy.
Soon now my own rest will come.
The silent river flows on in the dusk, miles and miles.
Outside the walls and on the roof and in the woods
the cold rain falls.
FEBRUARY 2, 1968
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
MARCH 22, 1968
As spring begins the river rises,
filling like the sorrow of nations
—uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains,
the debris of kitchens, all passing
seaward. At dawn snow began to fall.
The ducks, moving north, pass
like shadows through the falling white.
The jonquils, half open, bend down with its weight.
The plow freezes in the furrow.
In the night I lay awake, thinking
of the river rising, the spring heavy
with official meaningless deaths.
THE MORNING’S NEWS
To moralize the state, they drag out a man,
and bind his hands, and darken his eyes
with a black rag to be free of the light in them,
and tie him to a post, and kill him.
And I am sickened by complicity in my race.
To kill in hot savagery like a beast
is understandable. It is forgivable and curable.
But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath,
that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.
The serpent in gentle, compared to man.
It is man, the inventor of cold violence,
death as waste, who has made himself lonely
among the creatures, and set himself aside,
so that he cannot work in the sun with hope,
or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.
The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head
at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes
open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake
in the agony of the old giving birth to the new
without assurance that the new will be better.
I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s,
they are so open to the world.
I look at my sloping fields now turning
green with the young grass of April. What must I do
to go free? I think I must put on
a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die
rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.
I will purge my mind of the airy claims
of church and state. I will serve the earth
and not pretend my life could better serve.
Another morning comes with its strange cure.
The earth is news. Though the river floods
and the spring is cold, my heart goes on,
faithful to a mystery in a cloud,
and the summer’s garden continues its descent
through me, toward the ground.
ENRICHING THE EARTH
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the
dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
A WET TIME
The land is an ark, full of things waiting.
Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks
filling with water as the foot is raised.
The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands
become obscure in their use, prehistoric.
The mind passes over changed surfaces
like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs
and to the thought of swimming and wading birds.
Along the river croplands and gardens
are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark
and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch
holding the new nest of the hummingbird
the river flows heavy with earth, the water
turned the color of broken slopes. I stand
deep in the mud of the shore, a stake
planted to measure the rise, the water rising,
the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood
passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots
drag the bottom. I was not ready for this
parting, my native land putting out to sea.
THE SILENCE
What must a man do to be at home in the world?
There must be times when he is here
as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven shadows
of the grass and the flighty darknesses
of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond
the sense of the weariness of engines and of his own heart,
his wrongs grown old unforgiven. It must be with him
as though his bones fade beyond thought
into the shadows that grow out of the ground
so that the furrow he opens in the earth opens
in his bones, and he hears the silence
of the tongues of the dead tribesmen buried here
a thousand years ago. And then what presences will rise up
before him, weeds bearing flowers, and the dry wind
rain! What songs he will hear!
IN THIS WORLD
The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.
THE NEW ROOF
On the housetop, the floor of the boundless
where birds and storms fly and disappear,
and the valley opened over our heads, a leap
of clarity between the hills, we bent five days
in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on
the new, letting the sun touch for once
in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then
securing the house again in its shelter and shade.
Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history
has come between me and the sky.
A PRAISE
His memories lived in the place
like fingers locked in the rock ledges
like roots. When he died
and his influence entered the air
I said, Let my mind be the earth
of his thought, let his kindness
go ahead of me. Though I do not escape
the history barbed in my flesh,
certain wise movements of his hands,
the turns of his speech
keep with me. His hope of peace
keeps with me in harsh days,
the shell of his breath dimming away
three summers in the earth.
ON THE HILL LATE AT NIGHT
The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight
in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness
of the grass, fathomless, the long blades
rising out of the well of time. Cars
travel the valley roads below me, their lights
finding the dark, and racing on. Above
their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard,
and felt the country turn under the stars
toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here
between the bright silent thousands of stars
and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.
The hill has grown to me like a foot.
Until I lift the earth I cannot move.
THE SEEDS
The seeds begin abstract as their species,
remote as the name on the sack
they are carried home in: Fayette Seed Company
Corner of Vine and Rose. But the sower
going forth to sow sets foot
into time to come, the seeds falling
on his own place. He has prepared a way
for his life to come to him, if it will.
Like a tree, he has given roots
to the earth, and stands free.
THE WISH TO BE GENEROUS
All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.
AIR AND FIRE
From my wife and household and fields
that I have so carefully come to in my time
I enter the craziness of travel,
the reckless elements of air and fire.
Having risen up from my native land,
I find myself smiled at by beautiful women,
making me long for a whole life
to devote to each one, making love to her
in some house, in some way of sleeping
and waking I would make only for her.
And all over the country I find myself
falling in love with houses, woods, and farms
that I will never set foot in.
My eyes go wandering through America,
two wayfaring brothers, resting in silence
against the forbidden gates. O what if
an angel came to me, and said,
“Go free of what you have done. Take
what you want.” The atoms of blood
and brain and bone strain apart
at the thought. What I am is the way home.
Like rest after a sleepless night,
my old love comes on me in midair.
THE LILIES
Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found
the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,
frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air
held or moved them as it stood or moved.
The ground that slept beneath us woke in them
and made a music of the light, as it had waked
and sung in fragile things unnumbered years,
and left their kind no less symmetrical and fair
for all that time. Does my land have the health
of this, where nothing falls but into life?
INDEPENDENCE DAY
for Gene Meatyard
Between painting a roof yesterday and the hay
harvest tomorrow, a holiday in the woods
under the grooved trunks and branches, the roof
of leaves lighted and shadowed by the sky.
As America from England, the woods stands free
from politics and anthems. So in the woods I stand
free, knowing my land. My country, ‘tis of the
drying pools along Camp Branch I sing
where the water striders walk like Christ,
all sons of God, and of the woods grown old
on the stony hill where the thrush’s song rises
in the light like a curling vine and the bobwhite’s
whistle opens in the air, broad and pointed as a leaf.
A STANDING GROUND
Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;
Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal . . .
However just and anxious I have been,
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.