New Collected Poems (32 page)

As I sit here

in my little boat

tied to the shore

of the passing river

in a time of ruin,

I think of you,

old ancestor,

and wish you well.

With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe

Thank you. I'm glad to know we're friends, of course;

There are so many outcomes that are worse.

But I must add I'm sorry for getting here

By a sustained explosion through the air,

Burning the world in fact to rise much higher

Than we should go. The world may end in fire

As prophesied—
our
world! We speak of it

As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit

Of temporary progress, digging up

An antique dark-held luster to corrupt

The present light with smokes and smudges, poison

To outlast time and shatter comprehension.

Burning the world to live in it is wrong,

As wrong as to make war to get along

And be at peace, to falsify the land

By sciences of greed, or by demand

For food that's fast or cheap to falsify

The body's health and pleasure—don't ask why.

But why not play it cool? Why not survive

By Nature's laws that still keep us alive?

Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than the summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

WHILE ATTENDING THE ANNUAL

CONVOCATION OF CAUSE THEORISTS

AND BIGBANGISTS AT THE LOCAL PROVINCIAL

RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, THE MAD FARMER

INTERCEDES FROM THE BACK ROW

“Chance” is a poor word among

the mazes of causes and effects, the last

stand of these all-explainers who,

backed up to the first and final Why,

reply, “By chance, of course!” As if

that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.

In the beginning something by chance

existed that would bang and by chance

it banged, obedient to the by-chance

previously existing laws of existence

and banging, from which the rest proceeds

by the logic of cause and effect also

previously existing by chance? Well,

when all that happened who was there?

Did the chance that made the bang then make

the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?

Prove to me that chance did ever

make a sycamore tree, a yellow-

throated warbler nesting and singing

high up among the white limbs

and the golden leaf-light, and a man

to love the tree, the bird, the song

his life long, and by his love to save

them, so far, from all machines.

By chance? Prove it, then, and I

by chance will kiss your ass.

Jason Needly found his father, old Ab, at work

at the age of eighty in the topmost

tier of the barn. “Come down!” Jason called.

“You got no business up there at your age.”

And his father descended, not by a ladder,

there being none, but by inserting his fingers

into the cracks between boards and climbing

down the wall.

And when he was young

and some account and strong and knew

nothing of weariness, old man Milt Wright,

back in the days they called him “Steady,”

carried the rastus plow on his shoulder

up the high hill to his tobacco patch, so

when they got there his mule would be fresh,

unsweated, and ready to go.

Early Rowanberry,

for another, bought a steel-beam breaking plow

at the store in Port William and shouldered it

before the hardly-believing watchers, and carried it

the mile and a half home, down through the woods

along Sand Ripple.

“But the tiredest my daddy

ever got,” his son, Art, told me one day,

“was when he carried fifty rabbits and a big possum

in a sack on his back up onto the point yonder

and out the ridge to town to sell them at the store.”

“But why,” I asked, “didn't he hitch a team

to the wagon and haul them up there by the road?”

“Well,” Art said, “we didn't have but two

horses in them days, and we spared them

every way we could. A many a time I've seen

my daddy or grandpa jump off the wagon or sled

and take the end of a singletree beside a horse.”

To tell a girl you loved her—my God!—

that was a leap off a cliff, requiring little

sense, sweet as it was. And I have loved

many girls, women too, who by various fancies

of my mind have seemed loveable. But only

with you have I actually tried it: the long labor,

the selfishness, the self-denial, the children

and grandchildren, the garden rows planted

and gathered, the births and deaths of many years.

We boys, when we were young and romantic

and ignorant, new to the mystery and the power,

would wonder late into the night on the cliff's edge:

Was this love real? Was it true? And how

would you know? Well, it was time would tell,

if you were patient and could spare the time,

a long time, a lot of trouble, a lot of joy.

This one begins to look—would you say?—real?

 

(Titles are in roman,
first lines in italics
)

A gracious Spirit sings as it comes
281

A high wooded hill near Florence, an April
77

A man could be a god
251

A people in the throes of national prosperity, who
321

A shower like a little song
332

A sparrow is
20

A spring wind blowing
59

A woman wholly given in love is held
331

A young man's love is bitter love,
332

Above trees and rooftops
240

Adze, The
231

After the storm and the new
348

After we saw the wild ducks
230

Against the War in Vietnam
75

Air
325

Air and Fire
131

All day our eyes could find no resting place.
3

All goes back to the earth,
78

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
130

All that passes descends,
295

Always, on their generations breaking wave,
159

Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found
132

And I Beg Your Pardon
376

Anger Against Beasts
182

Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men
324

Anniversary, An
197

Another Descent
239

April Woods: Morning
68

Architecture, An
19

Aristocracy, The
17

Arrival, The
175

As I sit here
376

As I started home after dark
121

As my first blow against it, I would not stay
.
142

As spring begins the river rises
,
123

As the soldier takes bodily form
376

At a Country Funeral
183

At my age my father
188

At start of spring I open a trench
233

At the end of October
64

At the first strokes of the fiddle bow
298

Autumn Burning, An
247

Awake at Night
147

Before Dark
71

Being, whose flesh dissolves
161

Believe the automatic righteousness
75

Below
240

Better born than married, misled,
156

Between painting a roof yesterday and the hay
132

Between the living world
232

Beyond this final house
9

Bird Killer, The
18

Birth of color
68

Birth, The
143

Blue Robe, The
315

Boone
9

Breaking
166

Bridged and forgot, the river
292

Broken Ground, The
29

Burley Coulter's Song For Kate Helen Branch
353

By the fall of years I learn how it has been
217

Canticle
19

Cathedral
346

“Chance” is a poor word among
379

Clear Days, The
193

Clearing, The
209

Clumsy at first, fitting together
171

Cold Pane, The
232

Cold, The
65

Come Forth
342

Come, dear brothers,
324

Companions, The
16

Contrariness of the Mad Farmer, The
139

Country of Marriage, The
167

Creation Myth
249

Current, The
136

Dance, A
234

Dance, The
299

Dante
347

Dark with Power
76

Dark with power, we remain
76

David Jones
376

Dear Ed,
369

Dear Ernie,
373

Dear Hayden,
372

Dear Hayden, when I read your book I was aching
331

Dear John,
371

Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
190

Deep in the back ways of my mind I see them
61

Design of the House: Ideal and Hard Time, The
33

Desolation
281

Did I believe I had a clear mind?
166

Discipline, A
110

Do Not Be Ashamed
82

Do not think me gentle
248

Don't think of it.
187

Dream, The
72

Duality
328

Dust
345

Earth and Fire
141

Elegy
3

Enriching the Earth
125

Envoy
111

Epitaph
341

Even in a country you know by heart
252

Even love must pass through loneliness,
286

Except
251

Except in idea, perfection is as wild
33

Fall
247

Falling Asleep
232

Familiar, The
118

Farmer Among the Tombs, The
118

Farmer and the Sea, The
140

Farmer, Speaking of Monuments, The
159

Fear of Darkness, The
25

Fear of Love, The
234

February 2, 1968
122

Finches, The
69

First, The
250

Flying at night, above the clouds, all earthmarks spurned,
240

For an Absence
333

For parents, the only way
244

For the Explainers
307

For the Future
252

For the Hog Killing
230

For the Rebuilding of a House
119

For whatever is let go
24

Forgive me, my delight,
290

Forsaking all others, we
300

Forty Years
238

From many hard workdays in the fields,
312

From my wife and my households and fields
131

From the Crest
220

From the Distance
287

From the porch at dusk I watched
71