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
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.
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:
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