New Collected Poems (19 page)

that scars our souls?

The struggle is on, no

mistake, and I take

the side of life's history

against the coming of numbers.

Make clear what was overgrown.

Cut the brush, drag it

through sumac and briars, pile it,

clear the old fence rows,

the trash dump, stop

the washes, mend the galls,

fence and sow the fields,

bring cattle back to graze

the slopes, bring crops back

to the bottomland. Here

where the time of rain is kept

take what is half ruined

and make it clear, put it

back in mind.

February. A cloudy day

foretelling spring by its warmth

though snow will follow.

You are at work in the worn field

returning now to thought.

The sorrel mare eager

to the burden, you are dragging

cut brush to the pile,

moving in ancestral motions

of axe-stroke, bending

to log chain and trace, speaking

immemorial bidding and praise

to the mare's fine ears.

And you pause to rest

in the quiet day while the mare's

sweated flanks steam.

You stand in a clearing whose cost

you know in tendon and bone.

A kingfisher utters

his harsh cry, rising

from the leafless river.

Again, again, the old

is newly come.

We pile the brush high,

a pyre of cut trees,

not to burn as the way

once was, but to rot and cover

an old scar of the ground.

The dead elm, its stump

and great trunk too heavy to move,

we give to the riddance of fire.

Two days, two nights

it burns, white ash falling

from it light as snow.

It goes into the air.

What bore the wind

the wind will bear.

An evening comes

when we finish work and go,

stumblers under the folding sky,

the field clear behind us.

By the fall of years I learn how it has been

With Jack Beechum, Mat Feltner, Elton Penn,

And their kind, men made for their fields.

I see them stand their ground, bear their yields,

Swaying in all weathers in their long rows,

In the dance that fleshes desire and then goes

Down with the light. They have gone as they came,

And they go. They go by a kind of will. They claim

In the brevity of their strength an ancient joy.

“Make me know it! Hand it to me, boy!”

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,

if we will make our seasons welcome here,

asking not too much of earth or heaven,

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows. The river will run

clear, as we will never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be

green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground. They will take

nothing from the ground they will not return,

whatever the grief at parting. Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.

October's completing light falls

on the unfinished patterns of my year.

The sun is yellow in a smudge

of public lies we no longer try

to believe. Speech finally drives us

to silence. Power has weakened us.

Comfort wakens us in fear. We are

a people who must decline or perish.

I have let my mind at last bend down

where human vision begins its rise

in the dark of seeds, wombs of beasts.

It has carried my hands to roots

and foundings, to the mute urging

that in human care clears the field

and turns it green. It reaches

the silence at the tongue's root

in which speech begins. In early mist

I walk in these reopening fields

as in a forefather's dream. In dream

and sweat the fields have seasoning.

Let my words then begin in labor.

Let me sing a work song

and an earth song. Let the song of light

fall upon me as it may.

The end of this is not in sight.

And I come to the waning of the year

weary, the way long.

What we leave behind to sleep

is ahead of us when we wake.

Cleared, the field must be

kept clear. There are more

clarities to make.

The farm is an infinite form.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.