VII
Let us come to no conclusion,
but let our bodies burn
in time’s timelessness. Heaven
and earth give us to this night
in which we tell each other of
a Kingdom yet to come, saying
its secret, its silent names.
We become fleshed words, one
another’s uttered joy.
VIII
Joined in our mortal time,
we come to the resurrection
of words; they rise up
in our mouths, set free
of taints, errors, and bad luck.
In their new clarities
the leaf brightens, the air
clears, the syllables of water are
clear in the dark air as stars.
IX
We come, unsighted, in the dark,
to the great feast of lovers
where nothing is withheld.
That we are there we know
by touch, by inner sight.
They all are here, who by
their giving take, by taking
give, who by their living
love, and by loving live.
THE THREE
A woman wholly given in love is held
by a dying man and an immortal one.
The man dying knows himself departing
from her, leaving her in the arms
of the man who will live, cherishing her,
given to him as she is forever.
TO HAYDEN CARRUTH
Dear Hayden, when I read your book I was aching
in head, back, heart, and mind, and aching
with your aches added to my own, and yet for joy
I read on without stopping, made eager
by your true mastery, wit, sorrow, and joy,
each made true by the others. My reading done,
I swear I am feeling better. Here in Port Royal
I take off my hat to you up there in Munnsville
in your great dignity of being necessary. I swear
it appears to me you’re one of the rare fellows
who may finally amount to something. What shall
I say? I greet you at the beginning of a great career?
No. I greet you at the beginning, for we are
either beginning or we are dead. And let us have
no careers, lest one day we be found dead in them.
I greet you at the beginning that you have made
authentically in your art, again and again.
NOGUCHI FOUNTAIN
Sits level,
fills silently,
overflows,
makes music.
SPRING
A shower like a little song
Overtook him going home,
Wet his shoulders, and went on.
IMAGINATION
A young man’s love is bitter love
For what he must forego,
For what he ignorantly would have,
Desires but does not know.
The years, the years will teach him joys
That are more bitter still;
What in his having he forgoes
He has imagined well.
FOR AN ABSENCE
When I cannot be with you
I will send my love (so much
is allowed to human lovers)
to watch over you in the dark—
a winged small presence
who never sleeps, however long
the night. Perhaps it cannot
protect or help, I do not know,
but it watches always, and so
you will sleep within my love
within the room within the dark.
And when, restless, you wake
and see the room palely lit
by that watching, you will think,
“It’s only dawn,” and go
quiet to sleep again.
THE STORM
We lay in our bed as in a tomb
awakened by thunder to the dark
in which our house was one with night,
and then light came as if the black
roof of the world had cracked open,
as if the night of all time had broken,
and out our window we glimpsed the world
birthwet and shining, as even
the sun at noon had never made it shine.
PART FOUR
When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst
whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old,
gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not
JOHN 21:18
IN EXTREMIS: POEMS ABOUT MY FATHER
I
I was at home alone. He came
to fight, as I had known he would.
The war in Vietnam was on;
I’d spoken out, opposing it—
and so, I thought, embarrassed him.
Not because he loved the war.
He feared for me, or for himself
in me. Fear angered him. He was
my enemy; his mind was made
up like a fist. He sat erect
on the chair’s edge as on a horse,
would not take off his coat.
That was his way. My house was not
a house in which he would consent
to make himself at home that day.
The argument was hard and hot.
Tempered alike, we each knew where
the other’s hide was tenderest.
We went past reason and past sense
by way of any eloquence
that hurt. He leaned. I saw the brown
spot in the blue of his right eye.
Forefinger hooking through the air,
he said I had been led astray,
beguiled, by he knew who, by God!
And was I then to be his boy
forever? Or his equal? Or
his foe? His equal and his foe?
By grace (I think it must have been
by grace) I told him what I knew:
“Do you know who has been, by God,
the truest teacher in my life
from the beginning until now?”
“Who, by God?”
“You, by God!”
He wept and said, “By God, I’m proud.”
II
He was, in his strength, the most feeling
and the most demanding man
I have ever known. I knew at first
only the difficulty of his demand,
but now I know the fear in it.
He has been afraid always of the loss
of precious things. We live in time
as in hard rain, and have no shelter,
half hopeless in anxiety for the young,
half hopeless in compassion for the old.
The generations fail and we forget
what we were, and are. The earth,
even, is flowing away. And where
is the stay against indifference?
I know his fear now by my own.
Precious things are being lost.
III
My grandfather, in the lost tongue
of his kind and time, called drawers
“draws.” My father pronounced the word
that way himself from time to time
in commemoration. And now another
time had come. I diapered him
like a child and helped him go
with short slow steps to bed. Meaning
to invoke his old remembrance
to cheer him, I said, “Don’t lose
your draws.” “We miss him, don’t we?”
he said. “Yes,” I said. “Yes,” he said.
IV
Sometimes we do not know what time he’s in
Or if he is in time. The dead live in his mind.
They wait beyo
nd his sight, made radiant by his long
Unchanging love, as by the mercy and the grace
Of God. At night I help him to lie down upon
That verge we reach by generation and by day.
He says that, though we sleep, we love eternally.
V
He dreamed there was a storm
And all was overturned.
In his great need he called
His mother and his father
To help him, and one he’d known
But did not know found him
On the dark stair, led him
Back to his bed. Next day,
The dream still near, he said,
In longing of this world
That in the next is joy,
“If I could have found Papa,
I’d have been so comforted.”
VI
I imagine him as he must appear
to his father and mother now,
if from the world of the dead they see
him as he now is—an old man
sliding his feet along the floor
in little childish steps. I imagine
that they call him “child,” and pity
him, and love him as they did,
for they are senior to him still,
having gone through the dark door,
and learned the hard things and the good
that only the dead can know.
And I imagine that they know also
the greater good, that we long for
but cannot know, that knows
of all our sorrow, and rejoices still.
VII
Sometimes in sleeping he forgets
That he is old and, waking up,
Intends to go out in the world
To work, just as he did before—
Only to find that his body now
No longer answers to his will,
And his mind too is changed but not
By him. And then he rages in
His grief, and will not be consoled.
He cannot be consoled by us,
More mortal in our fewer years,
Who have not reached the limit he
Has come to, when immortal love
In flesh, denying time, will look
At what is lost, and grief fulfill
The budget of desire. Sometimes,
At home, he longs to be at home.
VIII
And sometimes he fulfills
What must have been the worst
Of all his fears: to be
An old man, fierce and foul,
Outraged and unforgiving,
One man alone, mere fact
Beyond the reach of love.
For fear this is his fate,
And mine if it is his,
I struggle with him. Thus
We ardently debate
The truth of fantasy
Empowered by wrath—the facts
He says are lies, the lies
He says are facts—his
Eyes in their conviction hard
To meet, hard to avoid.
We go into a place
Of ruin, where light obscures,
To the right place for us now
In our mad argument,
Exchanging foolish fire
In reasoned eloquence,
And winning no success.
We still are as we were,
And yet we do not fail,
For thus estranged we both
Oppose his loneliness.
IX
The dead come near him in his sleep
And, waking, he calls out to them
To help him in his helplessness.
And though they in their distance keep
Silent, and give no help to him.
And do not answer his distress,
I hear him calling in my sleep
Among the living in the dim
House, where he calls in loneliness.
I go to help him in the deep
Night, waked and walking in whose time?
I am the brother called in darkness.
X
We watch the TV show,
Smooth faces and smooth talk
Made for everywhere,
Thus alien everywhere.
In deference to old age
And time, we sit down for
What no one can stand up for.
I wish him out of it,
That man-made other world.
I wish undone his absence
In body and in thought
From open countryside,
Our local air and light.
To honor him aright
I call him back to mind,
Remember him again
When he was my age now,
And straighter-backed than I,
Still hungry for the world.
His mind was then an act
Accomplished soon as thought,
Though now his body serves
Unwillingly at best
His mind’s unresting will.
I summon him away
From time and heaviness.
I see him as he was.
XI
The light is low and red upon the fields,
The mists are rising in the long hollow,
The shadows have stretched out, and he comes walking
In deep bluegrass that silences his steps.
Elated and upright, he walks beneath
The walnut trees around the spring. His work
Is done, the office shut and still, his chair
Empty. And now at his long shadow’s foot,
He comes to salt the ewe flock, and to hear
The meadowlarks sing in the evening quiet.
He calls his sheep, who know his voice and come,
Crowding up to him as the light departs
And earth’s great shadow gathers them in. White
In darkening air, their fleeces glow as he
Puts down the salt, a handful at a place,
Along the path. At last, the bucket empty,
He stands, watching the sheep, the deepening sky,
The few small stars already pointing out.
Now may he come to that good rest again.
XII
What did I learn from him?
He taught the difference
Between good work and sham,
Between nonsense and sense.
He taught me sentences,
Outspoken fact for fact,
In swift coherences
Discriminate and exact.
He served with mind and hand
What we were hoping for:
The small house on the land,
The shade tree by the door,
Garden, smokehouse, and cellar,
Granary, crib, and loft
Abounding, and no year
Lived at the next year’s cost.
He kept in mind, alive,
The idea of the dead:
“A steer should graze and thrive
Wherever he lowers his head.”
He said his father’s saying.
We were standing on the hill
To watch the cattle grazing
As the gray evening fell.
“Look. See that this is good,
And then you won’t forget.”
I saw it as he said,
And I have not forgot.
EPITAPH
Having lived long in time,
he lives now in timelessness
without sorrow, made perfect
by our never finished love,
by our compassion and forgiveness,
and by his happiness in receiving
these gifts we give. Here in time
we are added to one another forever.
COME FORTH
I dreamed of my father when he was old.
We went to see some horses in a field;
they were sorrels, as red almost as
blood,
the light gold on their shoulders and haunches.
Though they came to us, all a-tremble
with curiosity and snorty with caution,
they had never known bridle or harness.
My father walked among them, admiring,
for he was a knower of horses, and these were fine.
He leaned on a cane and dragged his feet
along the ground in hurried little steps
so that I called to him to take care, take care,
as the horses stamped and frolicked around him.
But while I warned, he seized the mane
of the nearest one. “It’ll be all right,”
he said, and then from his broken stance
he leapt astride, and sat lithe and straight
and strong in the sun’s unshadowed excellence.
GIVEN
(2005)
In Memory: Ross Feld
PART ONE
In a Country Once Forested
DUST
The dust motes float
and swerve in the sunbeam,
as lively as worlds,
and I remember my brother
when we were boys:
“We may be living on an atom
in somebody’s wallpaper.”
IN A COUNTRY ONCE FORESTED
The young woodland remembers
the old, a dreamer dreaming
of an old holy book,
an old set of instructions,
and the soil under the grass
is dreaming of a young forest,
and under the pavement the soil
is dreaming of grass.
TO TANYA ON MY SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY
What wonder have you done to me?
In binding love you set me free.
These sixty years the wonder prove:
I bring you aged a young man’s love.
THEY
I see you down there, white-haired
among the green leaves,
picking the ripe raspberries,
and I think, “Forty-two years!”