a Negro wandered along on his way back
to a camp where he was working as a cook.
We told him we were Yanks and he was scared
but said, “God bless,” and took us to his cabin.
His people there had little food, but gave us
bacon and cornbread, let us get some sleep.
They said we had been moving south and might
catch up with General Sherman in Augusta,
sixteen miles away. For men as tired
and worn out as we were, that was good news.
In all my rambling days I never felt
a sixteen miles so distant. We left at daybreak
so we could see our route across a swamp,
threw our shoes away as they were almost gone,
and made ourselves some moccasins from the hide
of a dead cow we found mired in the mud.
But we would never make it to Augusta.
We ran straight into a rebel picket line
where Morgan’s men were shouting, “Halt. Halt. Halt.”
One was so excited his rifle shook
at us and I thought he would shoot. He said,
“Give us fair play, Yankees, give us fair play.”
This is an account of my experience,
though much is left out: the end of the war
and sorry death of Mr. Lincoln, months
in hospitals getting my strength back,
return to Edgar County, Illinois,
where Mrs. Mitchell, who had had no news
for quite a time, was glad to see me home.
I had little enough to show her for
the trouble of my being gone. The sword
I bought in Washington for the last parade
was not as fine as the one that I had lost
at Chickamauga. She told me our first-born
died while I was gone. No one knew the cause
and she had kept her grief for my return.
I’ve told these tales before, but wanted someone
to set them properly on paper, now,
in case my mind in old age starts to drift.
They say that when you age the distant things
are closest, and some days I find that true.
Sometimes I think of Oregon and young
Joe Barley, and the lonely way he died.
Sometimes I think of all the blood we’ve spilled,
but thinking that way only brings bad dreams.
It’s good to have the young ones dropping by
for visits, though Maggie never had her own
and she’s still living out in California.
Mrs. Mitchell died twelve years ago.
It come sudden. The doctor said a stroke.
Forty-eight years together, she and I,
and most of it was work. A fellow can’t
put into words the help she gave us all.
Not only the children. There were bad days
glumness got the better of me, she said,
“Mitch, you’ve come too far to give up now.”
I talk a lot, but some things I can’t say.
I’m getting used to living here in town.
This is my home. This is my home because
I say it is. I told you about my life
so you would know how this place is my home.
I knew I’d come back like a boy in love
and build my wife that frame house, room by room.
I knew that one of us would choose a grave.
And I will rest there when my time has come.
IN THE NORTHERN WOODS
The wind that stripped the birches by the lake
dusted the first snow on her hollow gaze,
then warmed her slender limbs for no one’s sake.
Hunters who found her stood by in a daze,
kerchiefs on faces, till the sheriff came.
No records ever gave the girl a name.
Anonymous as leaves along the shore,
where waves fall into lines until they freeze
and winter drifts against a cabin door
and change comes quickly on a southern breeze,
the birds will tell us nothing of her worth
whose small bones left no imprint on the earth.
SONG OF THE POWERS
Mine, said the stone,
mine is the hour.
I crush the scissors,
such is my power.
Stronger than wishes,
my power, alone.
Mine, said the paper,
mine are the words
that smother the stone
with imagined birds,
reams of them flown
from the mind of the shaper.
Mine, said the scissors,
mine all the knives
gashing through paper’s
ethereal lives;
nothing’s so proper
as tattering wishes.
As stone crushes scissors,
as paper snuffs stone
and scissors cut paper,
all end alone.
So heap up your paper
and scissor your wishes
and uproot the stone
from the top of the hill.
They all end alone
as you will, you will.
A MOTION WE CANNOT SEE
We found the path somewhat as it had been:
heather and rock of an alpine meadow
ringed by peaks like giants in a myth
we never learned; all our lives
we had played among them, and perhaps
our grief was payment of an unknown debt.
Perhaps the strange mist
caused us to question the path,
but our boots made a familiar sound
on the dirt runnel; the gray rocks
and stunted firs were congregated
as before.
We couldn’t say why we had come,
two living brothers and our father
whose hands were like ours
and like our brother’s hands,
bones and hair so much like ours,
flesh of our silent flesh.
I saw the place where we had cupped
the ashes, letting them blow
and drift over the heather.
A year of snow and snowmelt later
what could be left of him,
so utterly possessed by mountains?
Yet after a year of weather
tiny pieces of my brother’s bone
still lay in clefts of rock.
We found them under our hands,
cupping them once again in wonder
at what the giants left us.
Since then I have not gone back
to hold my brother’s bones. The prayers
of blizzard and snowmelt have him now,
and time flows down the mountain like the ice,
a motion we cannot see,
though it bears our blood almost forever.
from LAND WITHOUT GRIEF 1996
THE SOCKEYE
Two Aleut boys, poles sawed off for work,
run along the banks, over keels and gunwales
of dragged-up skiffs, following the ripples
for shadows of a fin;
the submerged eyes intent on dreaming home
under the shirring water, under the clouds,
the life swimming inland,
hooked suddenly and fought up the steep bank,
a saw-mouthed sockeye flips on the wet stones
until they club it and slit its belly open.
All my life I have tried to make sense
of what I cannot see. Those days alone
I thought I was close to it, swimming freely
under the watery clouds. Then I was hooked
and flapping, exposed to another sky.
Still being human, I wanted to dissolve,
to escape beyond my lim
ited knowledge
of blank hills and riprap, road and gull cry,
to swim out further than I knew, and find
the skill of children fishing on a river.
ON BEING DISMISSED AS A PASTORAL POET
The mounds of pocket gophers punctuate
these prairie stutterings of growth: willow
and poplar and cottonwood, bluestem grass—
and look, a little slip of a cowslip pokes
up from the muddy fringes of a creek.
The market value of such local knowledge
plunges yearly to new depths—one’s failure
to sophisticate these vast edges drear
with monologues on God’s withdrawing roar
(for all I know, She hasn’t arrived yet).
No shepherd parks his flock in this here field
and over yonder cash is all they grow.
The only oaten reed or reedy oat
I know’s the railroad’s melancholy note—
the train wails by ten times a day and traps
the traffic between Target and Cash Wise.
The eclogues you despise are hard to write.
Should I apologize for small-town ways
that offer to the critic nothing new?
Well, let me add what Mrs. Ferndale says,
counting train cars: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . .”
from THE BURIED HOUSES 1991
GUSEV
from the story by Anton Chekhov
The wind has broken free of its chain.
The sea has neither sense nor pity,
and what befalls us falls like rain.
The water’s hot as new-made jelly.
The sea has neither sense nor pity.
One dies while playing a game of cards.
The water’s hot as new-made jelly.
Above it there are curious clouds.
One dies while playing a game of cards.
Pavel insists he is getting well.
Above the ship are curious clouds
like lions leaping over the swell.
Pavel insists he is getting well
and dies despising the peasant class.
Lions leaping over the swell
turn to scissors as they pass.
He dies despising the peasant class
while Gusev lies in a fevered state.
Clouds turn to scissors as they pass
and dead men find it hard to hate.
Gusev lies in a fevered state,
wishing he didn’t have to die,
and though he finds it hard to hate
he’s saddened when he sees the sky.
Wishing he didn’t have to die,
he goes below to suffocate,
saddened now he’s seen the sky.
He thinks of snow, the village gate,
and goes below to suffocate,
his dreams increasingly absurd.
he sleighs through snow, the village gate,
sleeps two days, dies on the third.
His dreams increasingly absurd,
he tosses the fever from his bed,
sleeps two days, dies on the third.
They sew the sail cloth over his head.
He tosses the fever from his bed.
the fever smiles and crawls back in.
They sew the sail cloth over his head.
Below deck someone’s dying again.
The fever smiles and crawls back in.
The wind has broken free of its chain.
Below deck someone’s dying again,
and what befalls us falls like rain.
THE NIGHTINGALES OF ANDRITSENA
What did my young compatriots think of me,
those fawn-skinned children blond as German beer,
or the dark-haired ones full of their own freshness?
Did they wonder how I came to live in Greece,
or was I simply Mrs. Finn—translator,
tour guide, sadly middle-aged? As agreed
we met in Athens, and our Arcadian sweep
through history in an air-conditioned bus
began.
Professor Baird was keen to know
the right way to pronounce Epídauros.
At Nestor’s Palace he lectured out on the grass,
but those of us who formed his audience
were dazzled by the sea, the fishing boats
caught, it seemed, in pure, unframeable blue.
Though I sat politely, hands in my lap,
the students might have seen I hated lectures.
Perhaps they didn’t notice me at all,
and who could blame them? Why should they want to know
one’s hair grays, one’s husband leaves, one’s tongue
turns to stone?
My children, older than these,
live in America. I have a room
on Skyros facing the sea, a single bed.
I read long books alone just as I did
that night in Chicago many years ago
they came to tell me that my father was dead.
I have no reason to keep living here—
not a real one. It’s better for these students
wanting sunlight and a good rate of exchange.
For some it’s always harder. They want more
but with a vague unease, as I wanted words
held like the tang of wine, tasted like flesh,
as if all time might coalesce, memorable,
firm and rounded by the motions of the sea.
One boy, Ross, was like that. He had come
from a small town near Seattle. Reading books
had given him his first whiff of the world.
I think he was nineteen. I remember thinking
Oh, to be nineteen again, blessedly
empty-headed, able to dream in Greek!
He was the only student on the bus
who wanted lessons; for him the language came
like something his body’s motion could inhabit.
A girl named Angela would sit near Ross.
I thought them a couple, as we often do
who watch young people from a distance, guessing
at their lives. Both were good-looking, dark-haired,
with burnished faces, dreamy more than studious.
But he was curious—about the world, I mean—
and that set him apart. Angela, I think,
was curious about Ross.
We became friends.
The girl joined us at our breakfast lessons,
fumbled with us through the primer, as if
our struggle with words puzzled and intrigued her.
I didn’t mind. He wasn’t distracted yet.
We left the seacoast with its olive groves,
its sunlit trellises, baskets of fish
and bougainvillea. Our bus turned inland.
Above Andrítsena the Temple of Bassaë
crowned its grassy mountain, the gray stone
columns weathered more than the Parthenon’s,
each of them set apart like a new word,
magnificent in mass and workmanship.
After the usual lecture professor Baird
took most of his charges back to the hotel.
Ross and Angela lingered behind with me;
the keeper showed us how to find the path.
“Walking is good for the heart,” the keeper said,
though he was waiting for his cousin’s taxi.
Good for the heart, the silence after lectures,
after the last black spume of bus exhaust,
the silence of a walk through oak forests.
Ross was the strongest of us, but held back,
letting me set our pace. He wanted to know
the words for temple, footpath, oak, stream.
Here the trees were large and very old.
We heard the
tuneless clatter of goat bells
and saw the shepherd watching from his ridge.
We saw Andrítsena from above, came down
as if to land like birds on its tiled rooftops.
The paths were full of wood smoke, cooking smells
that quickened us. We had come eight miles
in near silence; the chatter of village life
rose slowly as we entered and sat down
under the plane tree by the cistern. Ross
opened the cistern’s door, described its room
carved out of rock, full of the cool water.
His voice became two voices, one loud
and hollow like a cave, the other muted,
ordinary, as he withdrew his head and laughed.
But we couldn’t linger there. We were late
to meet the others at the tourist hotel.
The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.
Sitting on my balcony as evening drifted
down from the oak forests, from the strong limbs
of the gray temple, into the gully below,
I had opened my Seferis to that poem.
Won’t let you sleep, won’t let you sleep. The day
had filled me with its grand foolishness,
being caught up by, of all things, a rhythm.
Won’t let you sleep.
So, you must be thinking,
here comes the epiphany of Mrs. Finn,
the moment when she sees how vain she is,
and you won’t be far from wrong. I sat alone,
wondering what they thought of me, but mostly
what he thought, younger than my youngest son.
Hadn’t my husband done it, chased the body
of a girl he hardly knew, someone met
at work, a plaything he later bored?
I knew that soon Ross and Angela would come
and we would listen for the nightingales.
The maid had told us there were nightingales
capable of twelve distinctive melodies.
Imagine that—twelve songs by heart, and all
the literary baggage: Keats, Seferis . . .