I
It is presumptuous and irresponsible to pray for other people. A good man would pray only for himself—that he have as much good as he deserves, that he not receive more good or more evil than he deserves, that he bother nobody, that he not be bothered, that he want less. Praying thus for himself, he should prepare to live with the consequences.
II
At night make me one with the darkness.
In the morning make me one with the light.
III
If a man finds it necessary to eat garbage, he should resist the temptation to call it a delicacy.
IV
Don’t pray for the rain to stop.
Pray for good luck fishing
when the river floods.
V
Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.
VI
Beware of the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.
VII
Put your hands into the mire.
They will learn the kinship
of the shaped and the unshapen,
the living and the dead.
VIII
When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.
When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.
IX
Sowing the seed,
my hand is one with the earth.
Wanting the seed to grow,
my mind is one with the light.
Hoeing the crop,
my hands are one with the rain.
Having cared for the plants,
my mind is one with the air.
Hungry and trusting,
my mind is one with the earth.
Eating the fruit,
my body is one with the earth.
X
Let my marriage by brought to the ground.
Let my love for this woman enrich the earth.
What is its happiness but preparing its place?
What is its monument but a rich field?
XI
By the excellence of his work the workman is a neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise to own the salesman is a neighbor.
By selling what is good his character survives his market.
XII
Let me wake in the night
and hear it raining
and go back to sleep.
XIII
Don’t worry and fret about the crops. After you have done all you can for them, let them stand in the weather on their own.
If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
But the real products of any year’s work are the farmer’s mind and the cropland itself.
If he raises a good crop at the cost of belittling himself and diminishing the ground, he has gained nothing. He will have to begin over again the next spring, worse off than before.
Let him receive the season’s increment into his mind. Let him work it into the soil.
The finest growth that farmland can produce is a careful farmer.
Make the human race a better head. Make the world a better piece of ground.
THE SATISFACTIONS OF THE MAD FARMER
Growing weather; enough rain;
the cow’s udder tight with milk;
the peach tree bent with its yield;
honey golden in the white comb;
the pastures deep in clover and grass,
enough, and more than enough;
the ground, new worked, moist
and yielding underfoot, the feet
comfortable in it as roots;
the early garden: potatoes, onions,
peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots,
radishes, marking their straight rows
with green, before the trees are leafed;
raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,
currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage,
strawberries red ripe with the white
flowers still on the vines—picked
with the dew on them, before breakfast;
grape clusters heavy under broad leaves,
powdery bloom on fruit black with sweetness
—an ancient delight, delighting;
the bodies of children, joyful
without dread of their spending,
surprised at nightfall to be weary;
the bodies of women in loose cotton,
cool and closed in the evenings
of summer, like contented houses;
the bodies of men, able in the heat
and sweat and weight and length
of the day’s work, eager in their spending,
attending to nightfall, the bodies of women;
sleep after love, dreaming
white lilies blooming
coolly out of the flesh;
after sleep, enablement
to go on with work, morning a clear gift;
the maidenhood of the day,
cobwebs unbroken in the dewy grass;
the work of feeding and clothing and housing,
done with more than enough knowledge
and with more than enough love,
by those who do not have to be told;
any building well built, the rafters
firm to the walls, the walls firm,
the joists without give,
the proportions clear,
the fitting exact, even unseen,
bolts and hinges that turn home
without a jiggle;
any work worthy
of the day’s maidenhood;
any man whose words
lead precisely to what exists,
who never stoops to persuasion;
the talk of friends, lightened and cleared
by all that can be assumed;
deer tracks in the wet path,
the deer sprung from them, gone on;
live streams, live shiftings
of the sun in the summer woods;
the great hollow-trunked beech,
a landmark I loved to return to,
its leaves gold-lit on the silver
branches in the fall: blown down
after a hundred years of standing,
a footbridge over the stream;
the quiet in the woods of a summer morning,
the voice of a pewee passing through it
like a tight silver wire;
a little clearing among cedars,
white clover and wild strawberries
beneath an opening to the sky
—heavenly, I thought it,
so perfect; had I foreseen it
I would have desired it
no less than it deserves;
fox tracks in snow, the impact
of lightness upon lightness,
unendingly silent.
What I know of spirit is astir
in the world. The god I have always expected
to appear at the woods’ edge, beckoning,
I have always expected to be
a great relisher of this world, its good
grown immortal in his mind.
MEDITATION IN THE SPRING RAIN
In the April rain I climbed up to drink
of the live water leaping off the hill,
white over the rocks. Where the mossy root
of a sycamore cups the flow, I drank
and saw the branches feathered with green.
The thickets, I said, send up their praise
at dawn. Was that what I meant—I meant
my words to have the heft and grace, the flight
and weight of the very hill, its life
rising—or was it some old exultation
that abides with me? We’ll not soon escape
the faith of our fathers—no mo
re than
crazy old Mrs. Gaines, whom my grandmother
remembers standing balanced eighty years ago
atop a fence in Port Royal, Kentucky,
singing: “One Lord, one Faith, and one
Cornbread.” They had a cage built for her
in a room, “nearly as big as the room, not
cramped up,” and when she grew wild
they kept her there. But mostly she went free
in the town, and they allowed the children
to go for walks with her. She strayed once
beyond where they thought she went, was lost
to them, “and they had an awful time
finding her.” For her, to be free
was only to be lost. What is it about her
that draws me on, so that my mind becomes a child
to follow after her? An old woman
when my grandmother was a girl, she must have seen
the virgin forest standing here, the amplitude
of our beginning, of which no speech
remains. Out of the town’s lost history,
buried in minds long buried, she has come,
brought back by a memory near death. I see her
in her dusky clothes, hair uncombed, the children
following. I see her wandering, muttering
to herself as her way was, among these hills
half a century before my birth, in the silence
of such speech as I know. Dawn and twilight
and dawn again trembling in the leaves
over her, she tramped the raveling verges
of her time. It was a shadowy country
that she knew, holding a darkness that was past
and a darkness to come. The fleeting lights
tattered her churchly speech to mad song.
When her poor wandering head broke the confines
of all any of them knew, they put her in a cage.
But I am glad to know it was a commodious cage,
not cramped up. And I am glad to know
that other times the town left her free
to be as she was in it, and to go her way.
May it abide a poet with as much grace!
For I too am perhaps a little mad,
standing here wet in the drizzle, listening
to the clashing syllables of the water. Surely
there is a great Word being put together here.
I begin to hear it gather in the opening
of the flowers and the leafing-out of the trees,
in the growth of bird nests in the crotches
of the branches, in the settling of the dead
leaves into the ground, in the whittling
of beetle and grub, in my thoughts
moving in the hill’s flesh. Coming here,
I crossed a place where a stream flows
underground, and the sounds of the hidden water
and the water come to light braided in my ear.
I think the maker is here, creating his hill
as it will be, out of what it was.
The thickets, I say, send up their praise
at dawn! One Lord, one Faith, and one Cornbread
forever! But hush. Wait. Be as still
as the dead and the unborn in whose silence
that old one walked, muttering and singing,
followed by the children.
For a time there
I turned away from the words I knew, and was lost.
For a time I was lost and free, speechless
in the multitudinous assembling of his Word.
THE GRANDMOTHER
Better born than married, misled,
in the heavy summers of the river bottom
and the long winters cut off by snow
she would crave gentle dainty things,
“a pretty little cookie or a cup of tea,”
but spent her days over a wood stove
cooking cornbread, kettles of jowl and beans
for the heavy, hungry, hard-handed
men she had married and mothered, bent
past unbending by her days of labor
that love had led her to. They had to break her
before she would lie down in her coffin.
THE HERON
While the summer’s growth kept me
anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river
where it flowed, faithful to its way,
beneath the slope where my household
has taken its laborious stand.
I could not reach it even in dreams.
But one morning at the summer’s end
I remember it again, as though its being
lifts into mind in undeniable flood,
and I carry my boat down through the fog,
over the rocks, and set out.
I go easy and silent, and the warblers
appear among the leaves of the willows,
their flight like gold thread
quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.
And I go on until I see, crouched
on a dead branch sticking out of the water,
a heron—so still that I believe
he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.
And then I see the articulation of feather
and living eye, a brilliance I receive
beyond my power to make, as he
receives in his great patience
the river’s providence. And then I see
that I am seen. Still as I keep,
I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.
Suddenly I know I have passed across
to a shore where I do not live.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1969
In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.
THE FARMER, SPEAKING OF MONUMENTS
Always, on their generation’s breaking wave,
men think to be immortal in the world,
as though to leap from water and stand
in air were simple for a man. But the farmer
knows no work or act of his can keep him
here. He remains in what he serves
by vanishing in it, becoming what he never was.
He will not be immortal in words.
All his sentences serve an art of the commonplace,
to open the body of a woman or a field
to take him in. His words all turn
to leaves, answering the sun with mute
quick reflections. Leaving their seed, his hands
have had a million graves, from which wonders
rose, bearing him no likeness. At summer’s
height he is surrounded by green, his
doing, standing for him, awake and orderly.
In autumn, all his monuments fall.
THE SORREL FILLY
The songs of small birds fade away
into the bushes after sundown,
the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.
Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters
flare in the dusk. The aged voices
of a few crickets thread the silence.
It is a quiet I love, though my life
too often drives me through it deaf.
Busy with costs and losses, I waste
the time I have to be here—a time
blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,
if only I would keep aware. The leaves
rest in the air, perfectly still.
I would like them to rest in my mind
as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,
the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,
poised there, light on the slope
as a young apple tree. A week ago
I took her away to sell, and failed
to get my price, and brought her home
again. Now in the quiet I stand
and look at her a long time, glad
to have recovered what is lost
in the exchange of something for money.
TO THE UNSEEABLE ANIMAL
My daughter: “I hope there’s an animal
somewhere that nobody has ever seen.
And I hope nobody ever sees it.”
Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods’ shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have waked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.
THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGE
(1973)
. . . Except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone . . .
JOHN 12:24
THE OLD ELM TREE BY THE RIVER
Shrugging in the flight of its leaves,
it is dying. Death is slowly
standing up in its trunk and branches
like a camouflaged hunter. In the night
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