New Collected Poems (18 page)

The mind still hungers

for its earth, its bounded

and open space, the term

of its final assent. It keeps

the vision of an independent

modest abundance. It dreams

of cellar and pantry filled,

the source well husbanded.

And yet it learns care

reluctantly, and late.

It suffers plaintively from

its obligations. Long

attention to detail

is a cross it bears only

by congratulating itself.

It would like to hurry up

and get more than it needs

of several pleasant things.

It dreads all the labors

of common decency.

It recalls, with disquieting

sympathy, the motto

of a locally renowned

and long dead kinsman: “Never

set up when you can lay down.”

The land bears the scars

of minds whose history

was imprinted by no example

of a forebearing mind, corrected,

beloved. A mind cast loose

in whim and greed makes

nature its mirror, and the garden

falls with the man. Great trees

once crowded this bottomland,

so thick that when they were felled

a boy could walk a mile

along their trunks and never

set foot to ground. Where

that forest stood, the fields

grew fine crops of hay:

men tied the timothy heads

together across their horses'

withers; the mountains upstream

were wooded then, and the river

in flood renewed its fields

like the Nile. Given

a live, husbandly tradition,

that abundance might

have lasted. It did not.

One lifetime of our history

ruined it. The slopes

of the watershed were stripped

of trees. The black topsoil

washed away in the tracks

of logger and plowman.

The creeks, that once ran clear

after the heaviest rains,

ran muddy, dried in summer.

From year to year watching

from his porch, my grandfather

saw a barn roof slowly

come into sight above

a neighboring ridge as plows

and rains wore down the hill.

This little has been remembered.

For the rest, one must go

and ponder in the silence

of documents, or decipher

on the land itself the healed

gullies and the unhealed,

the careless furrows drawn

over slopes too steep to plow

where the scrub growth

stands in vision's failure now.

Such a mind is as much

a predicament as such

a place. And yet a knowledge

is here that tenses the throat

as for song: the inheritance

of the ones, alive or once

alive, who stand behind

the ones I have imagined,

who took into their minds

the troubles of this place,

blights of love and race,

but saw a good fate here

and willingly paid its cost,

kept it the best they could,

thought of its good,

and mourned the good they lost.

For Hayden Carruth

Through elm, buckeye, thorn,

box elder, redbud, whitehaw,

locust thicket, all trees

that follow man's neglect,

through snarls and veils

of honeysuckle, tangles

of grape and bittersweet,

sing, steel, the hard song

of vision cutting in.

Vision must have severity

at its edge:

against neglect,

bushes grown over the pastures,

vines riding down

the fences, the cistern broken;

against the false vision

of the farm dismembered,

sold in pieces on the condition

of the buyer's ignorance,

a disorderly town

of “houses in the country”

inhabited by strangers;

against indifference, the tracks

of the bulldozer running

to gullies;

against weariness,

the dread of too much to do,

the wish to make desire

easy, the thought of rest.

“We don't bother nobody,

and we don't want nobody

to bother us,” the old woman

declared fiercely

over the fence. She stood

in strange paradise:

a shack built in the blast

of sun on the riverbank,

a place under the threat of flood,

bought ignorantly, not

to be bothered. And that

is what has come of it,

“the frontier spirit,” lost

in the cities, returning now

to be lost in the country,

obscure desire floating

like a cloud upon vision:

to be free of labor,

the predicament of other lives,

not to be bothered.

Vision reaches the ground

under sumac and thorn,

under the honeysuckle,

and begins its rise.

It sees clear pasture,

clover and grass, on the worn

hillside going back

to woods, good cropland

in the bottom gone to weeds.

Through time, labor, the fret

of effort, it sees

cattle on the green slope

adrift in the daily current

of hunger. And vision

moderates the saw blade,

the intelligence

and mercy of that power.

Against nature, nature

will serve well enough

a man who does not ask too much.

We leave the walnut trees,

graces of the ground

flourishing in the air.

A man who does not ask too much

becomes the promise of his land.

His marriage married

to his place, he waits

and does not stray. He takes thought

for the return of the dead

to the ground that they may come

to their last avail,

for the rain

that it stay long in reach of roots,

for roots

that they bind the living

to the dead, for sleep

that it bring breath through the dark,

for love in whose keeping

bloom comes to light.

Singularity made him great

in his sight.

This union makes him small,

a part of what he would keep.

As the vision of labor grows

grows the vision of rest.

Weariness is work's shadow.

Labor is no preparation

but takes life as it goes

and casts upon it

death's shadow, which

enough weariness may welcome.

The body's death rises

over its daily labor,

a tree to rest beneath.

But work clarifies

the vision of rest. In rest

the vision of rest is lost.

The farm is the proper destiny,

here now and to come.

Leave the body to die

in its time, in the final dignity

that knows no loss in the fallen

high horse of the bones.

In the predicament of other lives

we become mothers of calves,

teaching them, against nature,

to suck a bucket's valved nipple,

caring for them like life

itself to make them complete

animals, independent

of the tit. Fidelity

reaches through the night

to the triumph of their lives,

bawling in the cold barn before

daylight—to become, eaten,

the triumph of other lives

perhaps not worthy of them,

eaters who will recognize

only their own lives

in their daily meat.

But no matter. Life

must be served. Wake up,

leave the bed, dress

in the cold room, go under

stars to the barn, come

to the greetings of hunger,

the breath a pale awning

in the dark. Feed

the lives that feed

lives.

When one sickens

do not let him die. Hold out

against the simple flesh

that would let its life go

in the cold night. While he lives

a thought belongs to him

that will not rest. And then

accept the relief of death.

Drag the heedless carcass

out of the stall, fling it

in the bushes, let it

lie. Hunger will find it,

the bones divide by stealth,

the black head with its star

drift into the hill.

Street, guns, machines,

quicker fortunes, quicker deaths

bear down on these

hills whose winter trees

keep like memories

the nests of birds. The arrival

may be complete in my time,

and I will see the end

of names. The history

of lives will end then,

the building and wearing away

of earth and flesh will end,

and the history of numbers

will begin. Then why clear

yet again an old farm

scarred by the lack of sight