The Sound

by David Mason

  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

  to guide me by the solid things they stood for,

  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 . . .