New Collected Poems (6 page)

of hammering, half listened to.

He is comforted, not because he hopes

for much, but because he knows

of hope, its losses and uses.

He has gone in the world, visioning

a house worthy of the child

newborn in it.

Harry Erdman Perry, 1881–1965

Let him escape hospital and doctor,

the manners and odors of strange places,

the dispassionate skills of experts.

Let him go free of tubes and needles,

public corridors, the surgical white

of life dwindled to poor pain.

Foreseeing the possibility of life without

possibility of joy, let him give it up.

Let him die in one of the old rooms

of his living, no stranger near him.

Let him go in peace out of the bodies

of his life—

flesh and marriage and household.

From the wide vision of his own windows

let him go out of sight; and the final

time and light of his life's place be

last seen before his eyes' slow

opening in the earth.

Let him go like one familiar with the way

into the wooded and tracked and

furrowed hill, his body.

I stand at the cistern in front of the old barn

in the darkness, in the dead of winter,

the night strangely warm, the wind blowing,

rattling an unlatched door.

I draw the cold water up out of the ground, and drink.

At the house the light is still waiting.

An old man I have loved all my life is dying

in his bed there. He is going

slowly down from himself.

In final obedience to his life, he follows

his body out of our knowing.

Only his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep

a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.

He goes free of the earth.

The sun of his last day sets

clear in the sweetness of his liberty.

The earth recovers from his dying,

the hallow of his life remaining

in all his death leaves.

Radiances know him. Grown lighter

than breath, he is set free

in our remembering. Grown brighter

than vision, he goes dark

into the life of the hill

that holds his peace.

He is hidden among all that is,

and cannot be lost.

 

A spring wind blowing

the smell of the ground

through the intersections of traffic,

the mind turns, seeks a new

nativity—another place,

simpler, less weighted

by what has already been.

Another place!

it's enough to grieve me—

that old dream of going,

of becoming a better man

just by getting up and going

to a better place.

The mystery. The old

unaccountable unfolding.

The iron trees in the park

suddenly remember forests.

It becomes possible to think of going.

—a place where thought

can take its shape

as quietly in the mind

as water in a pitcher,

or a man can be

safely without thought

—see the day begin

and lean back,

a simple wakefulness filling

perfectly

the spaces among the leaves.

Deep in the back ways of my mind I see them

going in the long days

over the same fields that I have gone

long days over.

I see the sun passing and burning high

over that land from their day

until mine, their shadows

having risen and consumed them.

I see them obeying and watching

the bearded tall man whose voice

and blood are mine, whose countenance

in stone at his grave my own resembles,

whose blindness is my brand.

I see them kneel and pray to the white God

who buys their souls with Heaven.

I see them approach, quiet

in the merchandise of their flesh,

to put down their burdens

of firewood and hemp and tobacco

into the minds of my kinsmen.

I see them moving in the rooms of my history,

the day of my birth entering

the horizon emptied of their days,

their purchased lives taken back

into the dust of birthright.

I see them borne, shadow within shadow,

shroud within shroud, through all nights

from their lives to mine, long beyond

reparation or given liberty

or any straightness.

I see them go in the bonds of my blood

through all the time of their bodies.

I have seen that freedom cannot be taken

from one man and given to another,

and cannot be taken and kept.

I know that freedom can only be given,

and is the gift to the giver

from the one who receives.

I am owned by the blood of all of them

who ever were owned by my blood.

We cannot be free of each other.

Now constantly there is the sound,

quieter than rain,

of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright

gold, the sycamore limbs

bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers

are beeweed and aster, spray

of their white and lavender

over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds

loud—a landmark—now

that the life of summer falls

silent, and the nights grow.

At the end of October

I found on the floor of the woods

a small snake whose back

was patterned with the dark

of the dead leaves he lay on.

His body was thickened with a mouse

or small bird. He was cold,

so stuporous with his full belly

and the fall air that he hardly

troubled to flicker his tongue.

I held him a long time, thinking

of the perfection of the dark

marking on his back, the death

that swelled him, his living cold.

Now the cold of him stays

in my hand, and I think of him

lying below the frost,

big with a death to nourish him

during a long sleep.

How exactly good it is

to know myself

in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own

warmth, divided from all

by the cold; and to go

separate and sure

among the trees cleanly

divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,

your life withdrawn into

your own keeping

—to be clear, poised

in perfect self-suspension

toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the

goodness of that, it will be

good also to melt.

Terrors are to come. The earth

is poisoned with narrow lives.

I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats

at my heart. What have I done? I

need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see

what was done in blindness,

loving what I cannot save. Nor,

your eyes turning toward me,

can I wish your lives unmade

though the pain of them is on me.

The leveling of the water, its increase,

the gathering of many into much:

in the cold dusk I stop

midway of the creek, listening

as it passes downward

loud over the rocks, under

the sound of the rain striking,

nowhere any sound

but the water, the dead

weedstems soaked with it, the

ground soaked, the earth overflowing.

And having waded all the way

across, I look back and see there

on the water the still sky.

The morning lights

whiteness that has touched the world

perfectly as air.

In the whitened country

under the still fall of the snow

only the river, like a brown earth,

taking all falling darkly

into itself, moves.

Birth of color

out of night and the ground.

Luminous the gatherings

of bloodroot

newly risen, green leaf

white flower

in the sun, the dark

grown absent.

The ears stung with cold

sun and frost of dawn

in early April, comes

the song of winter finches,

their crimson bright, then

dark as they move into

and then against the light.

May the year warm them

soon. May they soon go

north with their singing

and the season follow.

May the bare sticks soon

live, and our minds go free

of the ground

into the shining of trees.

In the dusk of the river, the wind

gone, the trees grow still—

the beautiful poise of lightness,

the heavy world pushing toward it.

Beyond, on the face of the water,

lies the reflection of another tree,

inverted, pulsing with the short strokes

of waves the wind has stopped driving.

In a time when men no longer

can imagine the lives of their sons

this is still the world—

the world of my time, the grind

of engines marking the country

like an audible map, the high dark

marked by the flight of men,

lights stranger than stars.

The phoebes cross and re-cross

the openings, alert

for what may still be earned

from the light. The whippoorwills

begin, and the frogs. And the dark

falls, again, as it must.

The look of the world withdraws

into the vein of memory.

The mirrored tree, darkening, stirs

with the water's inward life. What has

made it so?—a quietness in it

no question can be asked in.

From the porch at dusk I watched

a kingfisher wild in flight

he could only have made for joy.

He came down the river, splashing

against the water's dimming face

like a skipped rock, passing

on down out of sight. And still

I could hear the splashes

farther and farther away

as it grew darker. He came back

the same way, dusky as his shadow,

sudden beyond the willows.

The splashes went on out of hearing.

It was dark then. Somewhere

the night had accommodated him

—at the place he was headed for

or where, led by his delight,

he came.

I dream an inescapable dream

in which I take away from the country

the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,

ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,

our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

I restore then the wide-branching trees.

I see growing over the land and shading it

the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.

I am aware of the rattling of their branches,

the lichened channels of their bark, the saps

of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.

Like the afterimage of a light that only by not

looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.

All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish

in dying as in being born. It is the life of its deaths.