around the lick they found
“very good, mostly
oak timber; a great many
small creeks and branches;
scarce as much water
among them all as would
save a man’s life
while he traveled across them.”
One day, engaged in this work,
Uncle James and his neighbor’s
son, Sam Adams, were passing
round the outskirts of the lick,
where had gathered a large herd
of the buffalo. The beasts
pressed together for the salt,
stomped, coughed, suckled
their calves, the dust rising
over their humps and horns,
their tails busy at flies.
They minded less than flies
the two men who moved
around them, thinking of other
lives, times to come.
And yet Sam Adams, boylike
perhaps, though he was nineteen
and a man in other ways,
would be diverted from his work
to gaze at the buffalo,
more numerous than all
his forefather’s cattle, oblivious
abundance, there by no man’s
will—godly, he might
have thought it, had he not
thought God a man.
And why
he shot into the herd
is a question he did not answer,
anyhow until afterwards,
if at all—if he asked at all.
He saw an amplitude
so far beyond his need
he could not imagine it,
and could not let it be.
He shot.
And the herd, unskilled
in fear of such a weapon
or such a creature, ran
in clumsy terror directly
toward the spot where the boy
and the man were standing.
Agile, the boy sprang
into a leaning mulberry.
Not so young, or active,
or so used to haste,
Uncle James took shelter
behind a young hickory
whose girth was barely larger
than his own.
Then it seemed
the earth itself rose,
gathered, fled past them.
The great fall of hooves shook
ground and tree. Leaves
trembled in the one sound.
Dust hid everything
from everything. Bodies
beat against each other
in heavy flight. Black horns
sheared bark from the hickory
that protected Uncle James.
It fled. The hectic pulse
died in the ground. The dust
thinned. Day returned,
as it seemed, after nightmare.
And there was Sam Adams
looking out of his tree
at Uncle James, who looked
back, his hat now tilted.
“My good boy, you must not
venture that again.”
And they walked southeast from there
two days, some thirty miles,
left a tomahawk and fish gig
at a fine spring, and marked
a gum sapling at that place.
(This poem makes extensive borrowings
from various accounts of the McAfee
brothers’ 1773 expedition into Kentucky.)
THE SLIP
for Donald Davie
The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.
Where the great slip gave way in the bank
and an acre disappeared, all human plans
dissolve. An aweful clarification occurs
where a place was. Its memory breaks
from what is known now, begins to drift.
Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness
widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.
As before the beginning, nothing is there.
Human wrong is in the cause, human
ruin in the effect—but no matter;
all will be lost, no matter the reason.
Nothing, having arrived, will stay.
The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon
passeth it away. And yet this nothing
is the seed of all—the clear eye
of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.
Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect
begins its struggle to return. The good gift
begins again to return. The good gift
begins again its descent. The maker moves
in the unmade, stirring the water until
it clouds, dark beneath the surface,
stirring and darkening the soul until pain
perceives new possibility. There is nothing
to do but learn and wait, return to work
on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.
Though death is in the healing, it will heal.
HORSES
When I was a boy here,
traveling the fields for pleasure,
the farms were worked with teams.
As late as then a teamster
was thought an accomplished man,
his art an essential discipline.
A boy learned it by delight
as he learned to use
his body, following the example
of men. The reins of a team
were put into my hands
when I thought the work was play.
And in the corrective gaze
of men now dead I learned
to flesh my will in power
great enough to kill me
should I let it turn.
I learned the other tongue
by which men spoke to beasts
—all its terms and tones.
And by the time I learned,
new ways had changed the time.
The tractors came. The horses
stood in the fields, keepsakes,
grew old, and died. Or were sold
as dogmeat. Our minds received
the revolution of engines, our will
stretched toward the numb endurance
of metal. And that old speech
by which we magnified
our flesh in other flesh
fell dead in our mouths.
The songs of the world died
in our ears as we went within
the uproar of the long syllable
of the motors. Our intent entered
the world as combustion.
Like our travels, our workdays
burned upon the world,
lifting its inwards up
in fire. Veiled in that power
our minds gave up the endless
cycle of growth and decay
and took the unreturning way,
the breathless distance of iron.
But that work, empowered by burning
the world’s body, showed us
finally the world’s limits
and our own. We had then
the life of a candle, no longer
the ever-returning song
among the grassblades and the leaves.
Did I never forget?
Or did I, after years,
remember? To hear that song
again, though brokenly
in the distances of memory,
is coming home. I came to
a farm, some of it unreachable
by machines, as some of the world
will always be. And so
I came to a team, a pair
of mares—sorrels, with white
tails and manes, beautiful!—
to keep my sloping fields.
Going behind them, the reins
tight over their backs as they stepped
thei
r long strides, revived
again on my tongue the cries
of dead men in the living
fields. Now every move
answers what is still.
This work of love rhymes
living and dead. A dance
is what this plodding is,
a song, whatever is said.
THE WHEEL
(1982)
It needs a more refined perception to recognize throughout this stupendous wealth of varying shapes and forms the principle of stability. Yet this principle dominates. It dominates by means of an ever-recurring cycle . . . repeating itself silently and ceaselessly . . . . This cycle is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
An eastern religion calls this cycle the Wheel of Life and no better name could be given to it. The revolutions of this Wheel never falter and are perfect. Death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.
Sir Albert Howard,
The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture
I
OWEN FLOOD / JANUARY 13, 1920–MARCH 27,1974
REQUIEM
1.
We will see no more
the mown grass fallen behind him
on the still ridges before night,
or hear him laughing in the crop rows,
or know the order of his delight.
Though the green fields are my delight,
elegy is my fate. I have come to be
survivor of many and of much
that I love, that I won’t live to see
come again into this world.
Things that mattered to me once
won’t matter any more,
for I have left the safe shore
where magnificence of art
could suffice my heart.
2.
In the day of his work
when the grace of the world
was upon him, he made his way,
not turning back or looking aside,
light in his stride.
Now may the grace of death
be upon him, his spirit blessed
in deep song of the world
and the stars turning, the seasons
returning, and long rest.
ELEGY
1.
To be at home on its native ground
the mind must go down below its horizon,
descend below the lightfall
on ridge and steep and valley floor
to receive the lives of the dead. It must wake
in their sleep, who wake in its dreams.
“Who is here?” On the rock road between
creek and woods in the fall of the year,
I stood and listened. I heard the cries
of little birds high in the wind.
And then the beat of old footsteps
came around me, and my sight was changed.
I passed through the lens of darkness
as through a furrow, and the dead
gathered to meet me. They knew me,
but looked in wonder at the lines in my face,
the white hairs sprinkled on my head.
I saw a tall old man leaning
upon a cane, his open hand
raised in some fierce commendation,
knowledge of long labor in his eyes;
another, a gentler countenance,
smiling beneath a brim of sweaty felt
in welcome to me as before.
I saw an old woman, a saver
of little things, whose lonely grief
was the first I knew; and one bent
with age and pain, whose busy hands
worked out a selflessness of love.
Those were my teachers. And there were more,
beloved of face and name, who once bore
the substance of our common ground.
Their eyes, having grieved all grief, were clear.
2.
I saw one standing aside, alone,
weariness in his shoulders, his eyes
bewildered yet with the newness
of his death. In my sorrow I felt,
as many times before, gladness
at the sight of him. “Owen,” I said.
He turned—lifted, tilted his hand.
I handed him a clod of earth
picked up in a certain well-known field.
He kneaded it in his palm and spoke:
“Wendell, this is not a place
for you and me.” And then he grinned;
we recognized his stubbornness—
it was his principle to doubt
all ease of satisfaction.
“The crops are in the barn,” I said,
“the morning frost has come to the fields,
and I have turned back to accept,
if I can, what none of us could prevent.”
He stood, remembering, weighing the cost
of the division we had come to,
his fingers resting on the earth
he held cupped lightly in his palm.
It seemed to me then that he cast off
his own confusion, and assumed
for one last time, in one last kindness,
the duty of the older man.
He nodded his head. “The desire I had
in early morning and in spring,
I never wore it out. I had
the desire, if I had had the strength.
But listen—what we prepared
to have, we have.”
He raised his eyes.
“Look,” he said.
3.
We stood on a height,
woods above us, and below
on the half-mowed slope we saw ourselves
as we once were: a young man mowing,
a boy grubbing with an axe.
It was an old abandoned field,
long overgrown with thorns and briars.
We made it new in the heat haze
of that midsummer: he, proud
of the ground intelligence clarified,
and I, proud in his praise.
“I wish,” I said, “that we could be
back in that good time again.”
“We are back there again, today
and always. Where else would we be?”
He smiled, looked at me, and I knew
it was my mind he led me through.
He spoke of some infinitude
of thought.
He led me to another
slope beside another woods,
this lighted only by stars. Older
now, the man and the boy lay
on their backs in deep grass, quietly
talking. In the distance moved
the outcry of one deep-voiced hound.
Other voices joined that voice:
another place, a later time,
a hunter’s fire among the trees,
faces turned to the blaze, laughter
and then silence, while in the dark
around us lay long breaths of sleep.
4.
And then, one by one, he moved me
through all the fields of our lives,
preparations, plantings, harvests,
crews joking at the row ends,
the water jug passing like a kiss.
He spoke of our history passing through us,
the way our families’ generations
overlap, the great teaching
coming down by deed of companionship:
characters of fields and times and men,
qualities of devotion and of work—
endless fascinations, passions
old as mind, new as light.
All our years around us, near us,
I saw him furious and narrow,
like most men, and saw the virtue
that made him unlike most.
It was his passion to be true
to the condition of the Fall—
to live by the sweat of his face, to eat
his bread, assured that cost was paid.
5.
We came then to his time of pain,
when the early morning light showed,
as always, the sweet world, and all
an able, well-intentioned man
might do by dark, and his strength failed
before the light. His body had begun
too soon its earthward journey,
filling with gravity, and yet his mind
kept its old way.
Again, in the sun
of his last harvest, I heard him say:
“Do you want to take this row,
and let me get out of your way?”
I saw the world ahead of him then
for the first time, and I saw it
as he already had seen it,
himself gone from it. It was a sight
I could not see and not weep.
He reached and would have touched me
with his hand, though he could not.
6.
Finally, he brought me to a hill
overlooking the fields that once
belonged to him, that he once
belonged to. “Look,” he said again.
I knew he wanted me to see
the years of care that place wore,
for his story lay upon it, a bloom,
a blessing.
The time and place so near,
we almost were the men we watched.
Summer’s end sang in the light.
We spoke of death and obligation,
the brevity of things and men.
Words never moved so heavily
between us, or cost us more. We hushed.
And then that man who bore his death
in him, and knew it, quietly said:
“Well. It’s a fascinating world,
after all.”
His life so powerfully
stood there in presence of his place
and work and time, I could not
realize except with grief
that only his spirit now was with me.
In the very hour he died, I told him,
before I knew his death, the thought
of years to come had moved me
like a call. I thought of healing,
health, friendship going on,
the generations gathering, our good times
reaching one best time of all.
7.
My mind was overborne with questions
I could not speak. It seemed to me
we had returned now to the dark
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