New Collected Poems (24 page)

Finally, he brought me to a hill

overlooking the fields that once

belonged to him, that he once

belonged to. “Look,” he said again.

I knew he wanted me to see

the years of care that place wore,

for his story lay upon it, a bloom,

a blessing.

The time and place so near,

we almost
were
the men we watched.

Summer's end sang in the light.

We spoke of death and obligation,

the brevity of things and men.

Words never moved so heavily

between us, or cost us more. We hushed.

And then that man who bore his death

in him, and knew it, quietly said:

“Well. It's a fascinating world,

after all.”

His life so powerfully

stood there in presence of his place

and work and time, I could not

realize except with grief

that only his spirit now was with me.

In the very hour he died, I told him,

before I knew his death, the thought

of years to come had moved me

like a call. I thought of healing,

health, friendship going on,

the generations gathering, our good times

reaching one best time of all.

My mind was overborne with questions

I could not speak. It seemed to me

we had returned now to the dark

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.

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.

for Kevin Flood

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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 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.

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?

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.

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 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 downward courses,

in its rising into air.

In law is rest

if you love the law,

if you enter, singing, into it

as water in its descent.

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.

Whatever is singing

is found, awaiting the return

of whatever is lost.

Meet us in the air

over the water,

sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,

the redbird sings,

here here here here.

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.

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.

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.

All times are one

if heart delight

in work, if hands

join the world right.

The wheel of eternity is turning

in time, its rhymes, austere,

at long intervals returning,

sing in the mind, not in the ear.

A man of faithful thought may feel

in light, among the beasts and fields,

the turning of the wheel.

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.

 

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.

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.

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