New Collected Poems (27 page)

such a people crave the further poison of official

reassurance. It is not logical,

but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore

their President who tells them that all is well,

all is better than ever.

The President reassures the farmer and his wife who

have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have

exhausted themselves to pay for it,

and have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for

the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the

prosperity of corporations;

he consoles the Navahos, who have been exiled from their

place of exile, because the poor land contained

something required for the national prosperity,

after all;

he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a

substance used in the normal course of national

prosperity to make red apples redder;

he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who

sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of

the floor of a mined-out stripmine;

from his smile they understand that the fortunate have

a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have

a right to their misfortunes, and that these are

equal rights.

The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man

who has seen God, and found Him a true American,

not overbearingly smart.

The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the

Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,

who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if

it came, would bring financial ruin;

he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory

and Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who

has been wakened in the night by a dream of the

calamity of peace.

Let us pledge allegiance to the flag

and to the national sacrifice areas

for which it stands, garbage dumps

and empty holes, sold out for a higher

spire on the rich church, the safety

of voyagers in golf carts, the better mood

of the stock market. Let us feast

today, though tomorrow we starve. Let us

gorge upon the body of the Lord, consuming

the earth for our greater joy in Heaven,

that fair Vacationland. Let us wander forever

in the labyrinths of our self-esteem.

Let us evolve forever toward the higher

consciousness of the machine.

The spool of our engine-driven fate

unwinds, our history now outspeeding

thought, and the heart is a beatable tool.

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

When I was young and lately wed

And every fissionable head

Of this super power or that

Prepared the ultimate combat,

Gambling against eternity

To earn a timely victory

And end all time to win a day,

“Tomorrow let it end,” I'd pray,

“If it must end, but not tonight.”

And they were wrong and I was right;

It's love that keeps the world alive

Beyond hate's genius to contrive.

Come, dear brothers,

let us cheerfully acknowledge

that we are the last hope of the world,

for we have no excuses,

nobody to blame but ourselves.

Who is going to sit at our feet

and listen while we bewail

our historical sufferings? Who

will ever believe that we also

have wept in the night

with repressed longing to become

our real selves? Who will

stand forth and proclaim

that we have virtues and talents

peculiar to our category? Nobody,

and that is good. For here we are

at last with our real selves

in the real world. Therefore,

let us quiet our hearts, my brothers,

and settle down for a change

to picking up after ourselves

and a few centuries of honest work.

This man, proud and young,

turns homeward in the dark

heaven, free of his burden

of death by fire, of life in fear

of death by fire, in the city

now burning far below.

This is a young man, proud;

he sways upon the tall stalk

of pride, alone, in control of the

explosion by which he lives, one

of the children we have taught

to be amused by horror.

This is a proud man, young

in the work of death. Ahead of him

wait those made rich by fire.

Behind him, another child

is burning; a divine man

is hanging from a tree.

From the union of power and money,

from the union of power and secrecy,

from the union of government and science,

from the union of government and art,

from the union of science and money,

from the union of ambition and ignorance,

from the union of genius and war,

from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,

the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

There is only one of him, but he goes.

He returns to the small country he calls home,

his own nation small enough to walk across.

He goes shadowy into the local woods,

and brightly into the local meadows and croplands.

He goes to the care of neighbors,

he goes into the care of neighbors.

He goes to the potluck supper, a dish

from each house for the hunger of every house.

He goes into the quiet of early mornings

of days when he is not going anywhere.

Calling his neighbors together into the sanctity

of their lives separate and together

in the one life of their commonwealth and home,

in their own nation small enough for a story

or song to travel across in an hour, he cries:

Come all ye conservatives and liberals

who want to conserve the good things and be free,

come away from the merchants of big answers,

whose hands are metalled with power;

from the union of anywhere and everywhere

by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price

and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;

from the union of work and debt, work and despair;

from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.

From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,

secede into care for one another

and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

Come into the life of the body, the one body

granted to you in all the history of time.

Come into the body's economy, its daily work,

and its replenishment at mealtimes and at night.

Come into the body's thanksgiving, when it knows

and acknowledges itself a living soul.

Come into the dance of community, joined

in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal

love of women and men for one another

and of neighbors and friends for one another.

Always disappearing, always returning,

calling his neighbors to return, to think again

of the care of flocks and herds, of gardens

and fields, of woodlots and forests and the uncut groves,

calling them separately and together, calling and calling,

he goes forever toward the long restful evening

and the croak of the night heron over the river at dark.

 

So God created man in his

own image, in the image of God

created he him; male and female

created he them.

To love is to suffer—did I

know this when first

I asked you for your love?

I did not. And yet until

I knew, I could not know what

I asked, or gave. I gave

a suffering that I took: yours

and mine, mine when yours;

and yours I have feared most.

What can bring us past

this knowledge, so that you

will never wish our life

undone? For if ever you

wish it so, then I must wish

so too, and lovers yet unborn,

whom we are reaching toward

with love, will turn to this

page, and find it blank.

I have feared to be unknown

and to offend—I must speak,

then, against the dread

of speech. What if, hearing,

you have no reply, and mind's

despair annul the body's hope?

Life in time may justify

any conclusion, whenever

our will is to conclude.

Look at me now. Now,

after all the years, look at me

who have no beauty apart

from what we two have made

and been. Look at me

with the look that anger

and pain have taught you,

the gaze in which nothing

is guarded, nothing withheld.

You look at me, you give

a light, which I bear and return,

and we are held, and all

our time is held, in this

touching look—this touch

that, pressed against the touch

returning in the dark,

is almost sight. We burn

and see by our own light.

Eyes looking into eyes looking

into eyes, touches that see

in the dark, remember Paradise,

our true home. God's image

recalls us to Itself. We move

with motion not our own,

light upon light, day and

night, sway as two trees

in the same wind sway.

Let us come to no conclusion,

but let our bodies burn

in time's timelessness. Heaven

and earth give us to this night

in which we tell each other of

a Kingdom yet to come, saying

its secret, its silent names.

We become fleshed words, one

another's uttered joy.

Joined in our mortal time,

we come to the resurrection

of words; they rise up

in our mouths, set free

of taints, errors, and bad luck.

In their new clarities

the leaf brightens, the air

clears, the syllables of water are

clear in the dark air as stars.

We come, unsighted, in the dark,

to the great feast of lovers

where nothing is withheld.

That we are there we know

by touch, by inner sight.

They all are here, who by

their giving take, by taking

give, who by their living

love, and by loving live.

A woman wholly given in love is held

by a dying man and an immortal one.

The man dying knows himself departing

from her, leaving her in the arms

of the man who will live, cherishing her,

given to him as she is forever.