New Collected Poems

  He has dreamed of a town

  fit for the abiding of souls

  and bodies that might live forever.

  He has seen it as in a far-off

  white and gold evening

  of summer, the black flight

  of swifts turning above it

  in the air. There’s a clarity

  in which he has not become clear,

  his body dragging a shadow,

  half hidden in it.

  8. A wilderness starts toward him

  The old man lives on

  among sheds and tools

  he won’t use again, places

  he won’t go back to.

  Around the place his living

  has kept clear there’s a wilderness

  waiting for him to go.

  In the wooded creek vales

  of his memory, that his mind

  opens slowly to become, all is

  as it was, and must be,

  the water thrush’s note chinks

  like dropping water

  over the rocks. To old fields

  and croplands the persistent

  anachronism of wilderness

  returns, oaks deepen in the hill,

  their branches mesh,

  into the pocketed shadows

  slowly as rocks wear

  the moss comes.

  Behind him, as if imagined

  before his birth, he leaves

  silence no one has yet broken.

  Ahead of him he sees, as in an old

  forefather’s prophetic dream,

  the woods take back the land.

  9. Though he can’t know death, he must study dying

  Knowing he must learn to die

  or be beaten, he has looked

  toward what he must come to,

  that bad exchange

  of all he knows for all

  he doesn’t.

  He has become the sufferer

  of what he cannot help.

  Knowing the euphemisms

  of the salesmen leave the mind

  wordless before its trials,

  he has learned

  among the quick plants

  of his memory

  to speak of their end.

  When vision is marketed to win

  there’s nothing in victory to desire.

  And it’s not victory

  that he’s going toward.

  He leaves that for the others,

  the younger, who will leave it.

  It’s a vision that generous men

  make themselves willing to give up

  in order to have.

  His luxury is the giving up of vanity:

  “Why should a man eighty-one years old

  care how he looks?”

  10. The freedom of loving

  After his long wakeful life,

  he has come to love the world

  as though it’s not to be lost.

  Though he faces darkness, his hands

  have no weight or harshness

  on his small granddaughters’ heads.

  His love doesn’t ask that they understand

  it includes them. It includes, as freely,

  the green plant leaves in the window,

  clusters of white ripe peaches weighting

  the branch among the weightless leaves.

  There was an agony in ripening

  that becomes irrelevant at last

  to ripeness. His love

  turned away from death, freely,

  is equal to it.

  11. He takes his time

  There’s no need to hurry

  to die. His days are received

  and let go, as birds fly

  through the broken windows

  of an old house. All his traps

  are baited, but not set.

  On the porch, in the potato rows,

  among the shades and neighbors

  of his summer walks,

  he finds time

  for the perfecting of gifts.

  12. The fern

  His intimate the green fern

  lives in his eye, its profusion

  veiling the earthen pot,

  the leaves lighted and shadowed

  among the actions of the morning.

  Between the fern and the old man

  there has been conversation

  all their lives. The leaves

  have spoken to his eyes.

  He has replied with his hands.

  In his handing it has come down

  Until now—a living

  that has survived

  all successions and sheddings.

  Even when he was a boy

  plants were his talent. His mother

  would give him the weak ones

  until he made them grow,

  then buy them, healed, for dimes.

  And from her he inherits

  the fern, the life of it

  on which the new leaves crest.

  It feeds on the sun and the dirt

  and does not hasten.

  It has forgotten all deaths.

  13. He is in the habit of the world

  The world has finally worn him

  until he is no longer strange to it.

  His face has grown comfortable on him.

  His hat is shaped to his way

  of putting it on and taking it off,

  the crown bordered

  with the dark graph of his sweat.

  He has become a scholar of plants

  and gardens, the student

  of his memory, attentive to pipesmoke

  and the movements of shadows. His days

  come to him as if they know him.

  He has become one of the familiars

  of the place, like a landmark

  the birds no longer fear.

  Among the greens of full summer,

  among shadows like monuments,

  he makes his way down,

  loving the earth he will become.

  14. The young man, thinking of the old

  While we talk we hear across the town

  two hammers galloping on a roof, and the high

  curving squeal of an electric saw.

  That is happening deep in the town’s being,

  as weighted and clumsy with its hope

  as a pregnant woman or a loaded barge.

  And the old man sitting beside me knows

  the tools and vision of a builder

  of houses, and the uses of those.

  His strong marriage has made

  the accuracy of his dwelling.

  As though always speaking openly

  in a clear room, he has made

  the ways of neighborhood

  between his house and the town.

  His life has been a monument to the place.

  His garden rows go back through all

  his summers, bearing their fading

  script of vine and bloom,

  what he has written on the ground,

  its kind abundance, taken kindly from it.

  Now, resting from his walk,

  he’s comforted by the sounds

  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.

  THREE ELEGIAC POEMS

  Harry Erdman Perry, 1881–1965

  I

  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.
br />   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.

  II

  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.

  III

  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.

  OPENINGS

  (1968)

  THE THOUGHT OF SOMETHING ELSE

  1.

  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.

  2.

  The mystery. The old

  unaccountable unfolding.

  The iron trees in the park

  suddenly remember forests.

  It becomes possible to think of going.

  3.

  —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.

  MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S SLAVES

  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.

  OCTOBER 10

  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.

  THE SNAKE

  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.

  THE COLD

  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.

  TO MY CHILDREN, FEARING FOR THEM

  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 WINTER RAIN

  The leveling of the water, its increase,

  the gathering of many into much: r />
  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.

  MARCH SNOW

  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.

  APRIL WOODS: MORNING

  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 FINCHES

  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.

  THE PORCH OVER THE RIVER

  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