Poems by R.S. Bear

Drawings by Ernie Goertzen

Copyright © 1994, R.S. Bear. 
These poems originally appeared on the Internet. All except the last two have also appeared in Bellowing Ark.

 ISBN: 0-9645574-0-1

 Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 95-67036

She sells books 
We went to see the place 
The wish for a country place 
(the first summer) 
When clouds race in 
It was not enough to see

stony run
 

She sells books from nine to six. They are
good books, well bound, well written, colorful
to the eye, and children love them, but
the town is poor. She sits waiting for hours
for one grandmother to come in and buy one book
for a favored grandchild. The owner of the store
is her friend; she cannot leave her just now, but the store,
she knows, is not her place in life. All
she has ever wanted is to farm: at evening,
when the dinner things are cleared, and the hot sun
drops behind the cottonwood, she farms.
Food for the ducks, and soapy water for broccoli;
old lettuce gone to seed comes out; the hay
is rearranged, and fall peas go in. She stops
only to hear the geese pass overhead,
then bends among her plants until the stars,
first one and then another, leap and are caught
in the hair of approaching night, which is
so like her hair. She comes in stained with soil
to the elbows, and leans against the table,
extending an open palm. "Look," she says,
her eyes on fire. "Marigold seeds! And these
are calendulas."

 2.

We went to see the place in Walterville.
Before I had even seen the house, the neighbor,
a man of some seventy years, bent with woods work,
stopped by to chat. "The house isn't much, but the soil
is good. Oh, it has some Scotch broom
on the pasture, but you can get ahead of that
if you keep after it. I helped the last guy
with his fence, but he wanted his gate over here,
where the tractor couldn't have got in."
We asked why there was no fence between his place
and "ours." "Oh, I don't need a fence. I
have nothing that wants your apples, no goats
or anything like that." We mentioned our ducks.
"Ducks are fine. Send 'em over--I'll treat 'em
right." I thought of Frost, whose neighbor needed
fences of old-stone savage granite, because
Frost's apples might eat his pine cones, and
his father had had a saying. This one seemed
more what one wanted: friendly but not oppressive,
and knowing of woods and wells. We walked over
the pasture till we reached the incense cedars,
each one five feet thick, and found a hanging
branch worn smooth by generations of children's
swinging. Good, and the valley here was wide,
with the mountains stretching east and west,
and sunshine access on short winter days.
But the house wouldn't do; bedrooms dark
and tiny, and the musty smell throughout
of dry rot underneath. Desire for the land
sets one dreaming. One acre, three acres--
not enough to farm, but who can farm
with these prices? It becomes a privilege
just to set out onions, and a cow
is not mere luxury, but even a kind of madness
so much as to consider. We have cross fenced
our high-taxed valleys so that to walk straight
for five minutes can't be done, and all
the while buying our produce from five hundred
miles away, where the tractors have as many wheels
as any freeway truck. I want to put
my hands into the ground and make it yield
enough to make my children grow, and not
grow poor in the process. We drove home,
and quarreled along the way about land,
the way people do who have gone to see
not only what they could not have afforded,
but ought not to have desired. The ducks
were glad to see us; she watered them, and I
picked tomatoes, and we kissed and made up,
and lay awake in our small suburban house
beneath the wheeling moon and stars. Why is it,
I wondered then and wonder now, that no one
ever seems to know when they have enough?

When sleep came, there was a vivid dream.
I met again the old man who liked ducks,
and saw him pointing to the earth. "This
was river bottom in here not too long ago,"
I heard him say. "When we drilled down forty
feet, we hit a driftwood tree, even though
the river now is half a mile away." He opened
up the earth somehow, and showed me the tree,
still caught amid the smooth and rounded stones
deep beneath the topsoil, which now I saw
was dark and rich, as he had said it was.
I reached to touch the soil, and awoke.
The northbound train was rumbling by the house,
carrying produce from industrial farms,
and I was drenched in sweat, and found the moon
had drifted far across the window to the west.

 3.

The wish for a country place can lead to folly.
The man placed this one on the market, after neglecting
basic maintenance for twenty-one years, and I
was the first to come along and take him seriously.
The sills are gone from dry rot, and the window frames
are cracked and full of bugs. Glass is falling
everywhere, and the ceilings are all drunk
with the evil wine of mildew-spores and rain.
His well is downhill from the house, and calls
the septic system friend and closest neighbor.
Beyond the well, blackberries guard the treasures --
broken washing machines and ancient radio sets.

 There was anger in the house, for the door frame
of each of the bedrooms has been split: privacy
yielding to boot and shoulder. One of the young ones,
despairing, wrote on the wall: "Either there is something
wrong with the system, or with the way it is being applied."
Another, in tiny scratches on the window sill,
escaped another way: "I love God."
Every surface in the building bore the marks
of violence and of forgotten cigarettes.

 We entered in a storm of wind and lightning, and the lights
would not answer to our tired hands, fumbling switches.
We shuffled about with buckets, chasing, in the darkness,
drips and the sounds of drips. We, the parents, briefly
ran mad with the foolishness of our choices,
and the children, without direction, formed their own
work party, unloading the truck by flashlight and storm-light.

 We gathered our strength with the gathering of fuel,
and sat by firelight together. Boxes of books
filled the shadows; in one, we found a brief tale
of a boy who made nails at a forge for his father,
and used them in roofing the barn by moonlight,
man and man together, one thirteen, one older.
By reading this story aloud, we filled the darkness
with caring, and took possession of the listening walls.

 As the weather cleared, fall already arrived, I borrowed
a ladder and assessed the roof: so much worse
it looked to me now it was mine, than when the agent
stood smiling and talking potential. Shakes could be seen
Through two layers of three-tab and mosses, and the gutters
seemed as if blown out with bird shot. I then took
two weeks of vacation: tore off, and carried, and hammered,
with the oldest child, from dark to dark, sweat dripping.
We flashed the old chimneys, and standpipes, and cut capping,
and rested, watching the change of day on the mountains,
and the play of leaf-light on the oak trees.

 Roof tight, there was time to examine the acre of soil
on which we would raise our foodstuffs. Small stones
lay on each of the gardens. The man who had been here
had built no soil, and his gardens laid bare many stones.
He gathered the stones in wire netting, and piled them,
but more came up in each springtime, like flowers.
He threw them in the bed of the dry wash, and into
the ever-increasing blackberries, and into low places,
yet they grew into multitudes. The man farmed stones
better than anything else he did. They called to him
at night, I think, and disturbed his rest.
Now it is winter, and I lie by my wife and dream
of the thousand-odd things that must quickly be done.
The rain, at least, runs softly away from the walls,
and the children are warm and are dry. I dream of the need
for a name for our strange new home, and my dream
smiles as it names the place: Stony Run.

 4.

(the first summer)

 She spreads the brightly colored packets
round the table, and speaks of hope.
I lift a flat paper envelope, with its picture
of a perfect beet, and shake it like a rattle,
"Hey-ya!" She sits across, nodding and smiling,
and hefts a half pound of peas, offering its promise,
like incense, to the gods of our little life.

 We've drawn out and made domains of the gardens.
The east one, very small, is on the highest ground,
and drains superbly. It is all hers. She loves
to dig in early spring and late in the fall,
coaxing brassicas, beets, chard, and sugar snap peas
to grow in long succession through the year.

 The south garden, sheltered from hot winds,
but prone to wetness, is all mine. I've raised the beds
as high as I can pile them, tossed away stones,
and spread out generous chunks of bales of straw,
redolent of the ducks who've nested on them.
Here tomatoes and sunflowers, limas and vine crops
broil in the sun by day and rest by night.

 The north garden, on the only flat, gets sun,
but stays colder longer. It is the largest,
so we share it, and here we fight. I look for
long rows of corn and beans, and always more
tomatoes. She tries new things I can't pronounce,
and seeks the permanence of berries: raspberry
is her favorite thing under the sun, I dunno.
We fight over water, when to use, how much.
We fight over planting depth, shade,
what to harvest when, and how long to blanch beans.
We fight all the way to the bedroom; its north window
opens onto the windswept beds. In plain view
the rustling rainbow windsock
presides there over the rustling corn,
and our fighting turns to sudden loving.
We hold each other's life, like seed, in careworn hands,
and sleep like seed until the sun's return.

 5.

When clouds race in, and quietly slam the shutters
shut, by which our little valley gathers its poor light,
I fold myself in coats and totter out
to gate the stock into their shred of barn
and gather bits of wood to start a yellow fire.
There are no lights except in neighbor's yards,
spluttering through naked arms of trees
wracked in winter-sleep. My shadow
jumps and runs away and back, afraid of itself
when reft of the comforting nightly field of stars.
I smell the creek, its life returning early
after the death of summer, slumbering under stone,
and stop beside the bridge to kneel and listen
to the slowly filling pools. Darkness above and below,
and the sound of water, of rain, and of wind
heavy with yet more rain. I walk, feeling the way
with my shoes, to the upper garden, and try to read
this wind. Its message is not in my speech,
and it rumbles north, unheedful, an unloved thing.
I wish for Orion, and solstice, and the circle of days,
and shift my load of sticks, and shuffle toward home.

 6.

It was not enough to see, in colorful magazines
and costly books, the country homes and garden walks
that men and women build who have only ready money
and a few ideas. I too wished to sit sometimes
drinking tea by firelight, admiring a work
of beams and plaster, hanging fruit and herbs,
good books liberally strewn, and a sleeping cat (or two).
To which end I labored without cash,
days and even nights with saw and chisel,
scraper, hammer, knife, and plane, using such wood,
such paint, and even such nails as came to hand.
My friends and the friends of my friends
remembered me when their surplus had to go,
and I went forth with battered truck and pry bar,
gathering decks and fences long past keeping
for those without the patience to rebuild.
I have learned to watch for stones of certain weight
and shape, to lay a course of ninety-year-old brick,
to scrap a window sash to get the glass for cutting,
and fill the oddly angled wall with joint compound.
When supplies ran short, I turned to the acre of ground,
and forked and spaded, laying out long beds,
piling them with straw, and covering the paths with leaves
of oak, maple, and ash. Seeds bought last year at sale,
ten cents a pack, were sown with trembling hand and a prayer.
They all did well: the new shelves are fat with harvest.

 This all has come late to me. Now I do sit
in chimney-corner like the English cottage-keeper,
tea in hand and cat in lap, ready to peruse
an act of Winter's Tale or book of Faerie Queene,
only to find my eyes no longer focus
on ten-point type for an act or a book at a time.
I call the youngest child, and she reads to me
from Sendak, or our mutual favorite, Potter, haltingly,
but with a will, improving as she goes. As she sounds out words
I watch a knot of fir collapse into the coals,
and fall to long, light sleep, with not unpleasant dreams.

 be not afraid
 

I have read that a monk

                                               in tenth-century China
felt change in his life, and wrote these words:
"My mind is the autumn moon
reflected on the bright stream."
His words
come to me as a sharp stone knife,
cutting away all
that useless flesh;
and I lie gasping on the moonlit sand,
a gift
for the blind fisherman.

Took a piece of bread

                                           and wandered: down
to pools, down to streams; examined the undersides
of clouds, swimming on their slow grey backs
in still water. These and the spring-bare trees,
and the winter teat of thawed leaf mould,
and the new birds on old nests, breast-brave,
egg-rich and cocksure, and the first fawn
mothered in close twilit last-year's bracken
say the old songs in the blood (again), the stories
and the root-songs sung to the wordless waters
passing these, through and among, to the sea:
we all do this, take breath and be not afraid.

Come, the wide waters

                                             roll, and the fishermen
roll their nets and go to the sun, to the broad
boats, where light, dancing, leafs boats
bright in gold, and gulls cross, crying,
the scene, and cross again, complaining. Come:
the fish, deep-dwelling, await. And waves
rise foaming, and the long swells' song
breaks like bread, or prayer, on the blood's tide;
all here oar-raised, green-psalmed, time-stopped
and the soul-strewn hulls gull-followed and gold-leaped,
arriving, see God's sung gifts named and given
into hands, working the nets, pull! And make
all things new, as the gulls ask alms, and the fish,
lashing, gape their salt breath out, and lie
still, communing. The wine-dark seas pass under,
and the heavy boats swing round, and the men roll
their nets and go, numb-handed, backs bent, harbor bound,
gift-laden, home: where light, fast fading, locks
land in gold, and gulls cross, crying,
the scene, and cross again, rejoicing.

Emily,
                you almost kiss
the bed with your small lips,
sipping night in these
surprising infant gasps
that hold a little life in you
for seconds at a time.
You sleep well, unless
the hour is cool, and then
you hunt for arms, and nose
to cold nose, tell silently
all you know into our beating hearts
until dawn comes.
I listen in fear,
for I suspect
that when I learn
what you are saying here between
your parents in the dark,
I will weep and mourn
from having brought you here
without your wings.

Morning chill
                            is anachronistic
in life's autumn. The greybeard treads diamond-
studded grass, and wonders at the still sleeping
grasshoppers. Returning to the house, he
puts water on for tea, and sets up the brass
telescope and viewing board so the children
may count sunspots. The rising sun climbs
the cottonwood tree. A silhouette of leaves
appears on the white board, stirring,
and now a line of Canada geese, southbound,
crosses the board from left to right
in impossible miniature. He calls to the children,
but they are otherwise occupied, rooms away.
He leans into the image, winged in thought,
flying already:

 but it is not yet time.

He did not expect

                                     to own a bike helmet.
But, as the salesman said, you only have one
braincase, and you'll only have it once.
He straps his head into the foam shell,
and grasps the chromed tubular steel, still cold,
of his mindless steed. Like him, it shows too many
miles, not enough maintenance. The wheels are out
of true; he wobbles as he goes. It takes him
through the still sleeping streets, where a few
stoop-shouldered men stand listening to the sunrise.
At evening it returns him up valley, beating into the wind.
The asphalt path
still smells of midday, and the lovers lie tangled
in the shade. They are everywhere in the afternoons,
the lovers, while the old men of the mornings are gone.
His off-center, treadworn tires are decidedly comical,
but they do sing, and they bring him home, and he thinks
of getting up earlier tomorrow, and of stopping to talk
awhile with the old men, while he and they are here.

The huge crows

                                 walk unconcernedly about
on the quiet ice of the summit glacier.
No one else is here. Strong winds, weak sun.
Far to the south, stealthily approaching,
a wide wave-front of storm, spitting sparks.
We turn our backs to it, gazing north, admiring
things we have seen only from below:
Middle and North Sisters, Jefferson, Hood,
and, half-hidden in the smoke from forest fires,
Adams, wrapped in summer ice. We sit stunned,
like two newborns, and gape at the silent crows.

 Well, what did we suppose we would do, once arrived
to look, at forty-three, from this breathless place?
Dance? or burst into song? Run naked along
the broken rim? Instead, we set out socks
to dry, and examine our toes and heels for damage:
half our journey lies before us, wrapped in cloud.

We are that kind
                                 of town-bred country folk
that say, when asked, oh yes, we do keep stock,
then easily turn the subject to one side.
Some friends persist; they want to know the worst.
"If you," I tell them, "want to do this, understand:
sometimes you'll have to take the place of God."
Our ducks, good Khaki Campbells, come by mail
in lots of twenty, every second year.
When small, they're all engaging, all underfoot,
following our steps with small heartwarming cries.
But half are drakes. In high summer
I don my serious face, and tie with care
my long blue apron on. I go out to the barn
with butcher's block, and like the surgeon
spread my choicest tools nearby. The axe
is first, and as its blade is rising,
I feel the panic rising in the eyes
hidden beneath my unrelenting hand.

"It isn't just age,"

                                  they told me. "His mind wanders,
and he won't know who you are, though he's been told;
He'll be friendly and gentlemanlike, and he wants
to be part of the conversation. Just string along
and nod and smile, and though he won't make any sense
at all, you'll do fine."

 I sat across the table from his chair.
We made a few remarks, aimless and kind,
on the weather, and on his daughter's surgery:
the shock, now past, that brought the family briefly
together in Oregon, west of their home in Wisconsin.
After a pause, he took up another theme.

 "I was a trucker; always was a trucker,
and never saw the girls much as they grew.
Margaret did everything, and did it all well,
and raised them, and raised me too, whenever I
stopped by. We did okay, I guess; it's been
forty-nine winters now." He paused again,
and gazed, it seemed to me, a long way off
east by northeast, beyond my shoulder's horizon.
"When I first saw Margaret, I knew right away
she was the one. I talked her up and talked
till I ran all out of soda money, and then
we both got done with high school and hitched up,
graduation and wedding all at once, like.
We went up country to the cabin on the lake.
Ever been to Wisconsin?" I said no.
"If you ever get the chance, go in summer.
Get you a cabin on a lake. Wisconsin
has fine lakes: clean water, mean fish; nothing
like it anywhere else. There was this rock
right by the cabin, see, and deep water there
just off the rock. Margaret put on her suit
and swimming cap, and dived off. I stood
and watched her swimming, oh twenty feet down.
I never had seen anything so pretty,
and I never have since." We sat awhile in silence,
man and man, and soon the others came
from the kitchen, to rescue us each from the other.
I was asked, later that evening, how confused
he'd been, and had to answer truthfully: I
had met a man in his right mind, and clear as a bell.

 He died about two weeks after, somewhere in Florida.
I try to remember him, but I cannot find his face;
when I try, I see Margaret, eighteen and strong,
long of arm and back, dividing Wisconsin waters:
from where I stand on the open rock, I find
that June sun, low in the east, rising forever.

Fourth of July

The rest were absorbed by crowds round the huge
cherry trees, or on the impromptu volleyball court,
or touring the huge gardens, or tasting,
in hot sun, imported beers found floating
in icy washtubs. The boy, who never mixed well,
wandered off to sit in shade alone, a brown study.
To him I gravitated, not crowd-pleased myself,
and said: In the car's trunk there are two rods,
and the creek is still high; perhaps along the bank
we can find bait. He had never, in his ten years,
caught fish, as he often reminded me, but I
had never found the time. I found the time.
We slunk away, and stalked along the country road
deep in shade of hemlocks, cedars, and bigleaf,
looking for a way steep-down, with vine maples
and giant ferns to cling to. Below, the sun burned
on golden unmown hay, lodged by the frequent passage
of quite untroubled blacktailed bucks with harems.
We found the place, and bushwhacked through
to where the icy water rippled over bedrock
beneath the old-growth alders. All there
was just so, with a good pool every fifty feet,
black with promise. I looked for caddis larvae,
turning over stones, and finding nothing,
but the boy quick of eye and hand leaped up
with a tiny crawdad clutched. I gently took
and threaded the sacrificial creature on the shank
of the gleaming, tiny hook. Like all fathers
before me, as I imagined, I glossed over the pain
of this small life, quickly casting hook,
life, and split shot expertly into riffle
just above a pool half-lost in willow branches.
I handed him the rod. He sulked: It won't work,
I've never caught a fish, and this creek's
too small. I said, do not misjudge it. The trout
winter here, and are not driven by the sun
to the river's deeper pools till later on.
There will be several in that hole, and one
of them will be big. He watched the willows,
the dappled banks, the far pasture, passing birds,
and me; I watched the line. It zigged. Pull!
I shouted, and the boy hauled back, more
in startlement than skill; I itched to snatch
the rod from him. Reel in, reel in, pull back,
give him slack, now reel! I was beside myself,
and so was the lad. The fish fought well, then
gave up at our feet, reeled on to land. We
slacked line, and I knelt and slipped my hand
along the back, so as not to get caught on hackles,
and disengaged the hook. I whispered: this
is a rainbow trout; see the colors as I turn him
in the sun. The boy stroked the big trout gently,
and solemnly announced: I have caught a fish.

 We waded through the riffle to let him go;
but he was tired all through, and rolled
over, showing white. I gave the boy the way
to turn trout right, facing upstream, until
they catch their wet breath and swim away unaided.
He helped the fish, and stood up rich in life; then,
reluctant to break the moment and go back,
we stood together silently as trees.

George Fox

                          sits in hollow trees in the rain,
and seeks this same God whom all the people
call upon in half jest from pillowed pews.
The King! The King! cry they, asleep, while he
sees the chains still on their legs, and his,
and questions this, and them, asking of priests
and of great men of learning, hearing but vacancy
in their sonorous answers. Then, in a high place
(it is often in these high places that it happens,
take heed) he heeds a voice no chain will stand,
and his heart leaps. All creation has now
for him a new smell, such as it had not before,
and the God-swarmed man's heart leaps over the world,
and over its bad master. Good George, broad head
bible-steeped, sees through the steeple to the soul's
church, and calls in the voice of Isaiah: come,
buy wine and bread without money and without price!
And many come to hear the mad man speak;
life is hard, and God's fools must be their fun.
But this one will strike sparks, his Christ-fire spreads!
Hell helpless for once looks on, as love, the power
of God, rises from the dead; even England
draws saints' breath, and some for a time are such
as God in Eden walked with.

The painted angel

                                      with his heavy wings
paced along the footworn ancient flags
of the deep cathedral nave before the quiet
congregation, awaiting three Marys,
ready to proclaim the great and terrible emptiness
of God's tomb: Non est hic; surrexit,
sicut praedixerat! So that a friar
preaching to a dubious crowd, at length
advised them: "If you believe not me, go
to Coventry, where you may see it acted
every year." Faith enacted may
be faith, or it may not be faith, and yet
thousands were thrilled to hear the angel cry,
and homeward bent their weary peasant backs,
some with missing limbs or eyes, and some
all poxed, yet talking as they went, of God,
and of brightness all around, one night,
that vexed the frightened shepherds long ago.

We went fishing

                                 out of Newport. Out of sight of land
for once in my life, I hooked my leg
onto the railing for protection, as the water
rolled green and sullen over the bow,
burying me to my waist in the wide Pacific.
The old man grew ill for the first time
in his long life, leaned out and puked,
and settled in the cabin. I poured coffee
with my knees jammed between the bunks, the world
halfway upside down, and hovered near him, anxious.
"It's no big thing," he said, "My turn has come
at last. Off the coast of Okinawa, when I was young,
me and one lieutenant were the only ones not sick
on the ship, with a whole crew down, and
four thousand sick Marines below.
We tied ourselves to the wheel and pulled,
first him and then me, back and forth, all night,
keeping her bow on to the waves. Some of those waves
reached right up to the bridge, where we were,
and that was eighty feet from water line in a calm.
We saw a destroyer lifted up on two crests, bow and stern,
and she broke in the middle and sank like a rock
between them." The charter men found their reef,
heaved the anchor, and shut the engines down.

 The old man sent me out to catch us both some fish
so as not to waste our day, he said, but also,
said I to myself, to leave him where he was,
somewhere else in time, honoring his sudden dead
and the man among living men that he had been.

This for the steep road

                                              the mind travels
when having, as Popper says, "problems and the urge
to solve them"; and the academy, as one arrives,
already is carved into camps of warring faction
for which the legionaries have long ago thrown up
high earthen walls impaled with sharpened stakes
of rhetoric, which they deem as pure induction
(provided it is their own and not another's):
find one place, each campus has one such,
that seems in quietude to fold into itself
a peace that stills the mind, even upon approach.
There go whenever you have need, and say
no word, but gather yourself in silence and new-build
whatever of good presents itself therein.
My own such place is called the "grotto;" it
contains several modern sculptures which
(I thank the architect) do not too much
obtrude, and one large well-made pool that fills
the colonnade with its inverted sky.
Striding in the pool, one bronze from a simpler
time, known as "Indian Maiden with Fawn,"
comments upon our easy scoffs as to
its demeaning romanticism by having no
politics of its own, and not minding
us as it neither minds the rain nor the sometime
sun. A small susurrant fount behind
the pool pours out between two cherubs playing
pipes; or rather one plays, the other has stopped
to listen, half smiling. I am not too young to linger here
alone on autumn days, finding, without knowing
that I do, the warmest angle in the red brick walls
to sit and offer my bones to the slowly sinking
sun. Undergrads and visitors pass,
by threes or more sometimes, but mostly twos,
strolling along the arched arcade,
and talking, always, in hushed
and reverent voice, as in a church of stones
and moss and ancient bits of colored glass.
I sit, a bronze, among these friends and lovers:
perhaps I have been here alone too long.
Some artist opportunely may have captioned
me: "Man in Search of Truth." So quaint!
I am like the maiden, out of my academic time
and fashion, but well-placed within these walls.
The visitors understand art, and know that it
is worship. They pass along the walk, half-smiling,
and some among them catch my silence as a song.

Eighty-six, he stands

                                        in his garden and tells
of the journey from Ohio that never ended,
not even with the case of sun-ripe peaches.

 "The Lord sure has blessed me. Oh, yes.
See how the apricots grow, and the pears,
and the oranges? And these now, the farmers
hate them, but I don't, I water them;
the Spaniards, when they landed, looked for a sign
and the loaves and the fish of our Lord
were seen in the flowers of the vine."

He walks in the shade of the live oaks,
talks of Kentucky, of boyhood and manhood,
Of the girl that he married, who fell
years later, and broke something inside,
and the child they had found, and the land,
and the tall pines he tended, that stand
where the wind-driven lake once rippled
and broke on the crystalline sand.

something, after all
 

Marching on the Potomac
 
 

(1971-1991)
      

Rock videos, I admit, do hurt my eyes. They seem
like moments that have been seized by those who believe
they are young, and also believe that history is only
words, and also believe that with images, words
can be left behind forever, words and the history
that is made with words, and death, which is made up
of history, and pain that rehearses for death,
and the memories of shame the pain is built on -- but
the shame and pain are images, yes? and history,
yes? your history, your story you tell yourself
in pictures, is your music video sung
to self-loathing; and the one way, short of becoming
a filmmaker, of spitting it out, is to trade in words,
the betrayer words that lie as soon as the ink
is dry. While I, the new-made greybeard thinking
on mortality walking off small ounces along
the winter river, remember seizing a moment,
standing with three hundred young such others
in our vision of moral progress around
the entrance to the dark abysmal cave: National
Selective Service Headquarters. We begged them
to come out, the denizens of the cave, and took up
collections for their families if only they
would come out. Some did, and even took the money,
perhaps to return to work next day with a laugh.
Provocateurs circulated among us,
trying to hand out bad acid, but we stood firm,
singing our power songs learned from those
who had come here before us: Oh Freedom; We
Shall Overcome; so then the men in blue,
with their sunglasses and their long sticks,
moved in and carried us away, one by one,
to the buses. D.C. Central Precinct
Station, in case you're curious, is, or was,
twenty years ago, like this: a corridor
long and grey, with few lights, and rows of animal
cages, dark, with broken bulbs recessed
in peeled ceilings. Each cage has two iron
shelves hung from the wall on chains, and no
matresses on the shelves; on the rear wall
a strange porcelain thing, both sink (not working)
and toilet (not working either); both filled with
horrors, and run over onto the floor.
Distance from front to back: exactly eight feet.
From side to side, exactly six feet. Eight men
to a cell. Rumor: in the women's section,
much worse. Someone is screaming continually;
another starts the ancient chant, AUM --
it catches on, a hundred and fifty short-time
monks in retreat, and the screamer settles
down to a comforted whimper. All day, half
the night. At two in the morning, arraignments.
Fifty people standing in an empty room,
waiting, weak, hungry. A judge passes
in the hall, returns, converses through the door.
You weren't read your rights? You don't know the charges
against you? No phone calls? Nothing? He goes away,
returns, passes fifteen candy bars
through the mail slot. All I can do right now,
he says, I'll see what I can do about this.
We never see him again. We are processed
in groups of four. An old black woman comes.
She is our lawyer. Have you seen the charges?
No. Hey, you, go and get the charges
so they can plead; is this a court or a pool hall?
They read us the charges. False, from beginning
to end, and they know it! You can hear it in
their shamed voices. They're young, like us,
and got these jobs for the sake of Kennedy,
their dead god; they aren't used to shitting
on the people. I hear that I was seen by witnesses
(in blue, with their sunglasses and their long sticks)
committing unspeakable violence and destroying Property
--hearing the shame in their trembling voices, I
am brought to tears of a new kind, deep grief
for my country, which I had somehow believed in,
a little, until that moment, and for my now
forever lost innocence in these things. The judge
leans forward. Young man, if you plead guilty, I
can let you go right now with a ten dollar fine.
If you plead not guilty, you will be held in JAIL
and your trial will not come up for two months.
I want you to know that the Central Precinct is clean
and uncrowded compared to the City Jail. How
do you plead? The tears are drying, but I tremble
with sorrow and anger. Someone, a stranger, steps up
and sets a flower in the lapel of my coat. Not guilty.
All four of us say, not guilty as charged; our old
lawyer's eyes are wet with pride. The judge hesitates;
says that for twenty-five dollars each, we
can go bail. I'm eight hundred miles from home,
with ten cents to my name. Someone, another
stranger, hands over twenty-five dollars for me;
I leave the courtroom dazed and hungry. I have
nowhere to go. It is three o'clock in the morning.
The demonstrations have been going on all week,
and I haven't eaten in maybe three days, or four.
I'm not sure I can make it to the Friends Meeting House
where I know I can sleep. There is a voice from above:
Hey, you! I look up. It is a middle-aged woman
in curlers and a robe, in a third-floor window of,
for God's sake, the D.C. Hilton Hotel. Are you
one of the people that just got out of that kangaroo
court? I heard about it on the radio!
Yes'm, I am. (Yes'm is a reflex --
I'm from the Deep South.) Wait right there,
says she, and disappears. A moment later,
she's in the window again, and a can of Coca-cola,
two orders of fries, and a half-eaten burger wrapped
in foil come down from the sky. I'm dumbfounded.
If it had been a thousand pieces of gold,
it would not have amazed me more. The Hilton Hotel:
heaven, and someone else's hamburger: manna.
The angel glances over her shoulder, worried.
Gotta run now. Good luck!
 

...Twenty years ago.
I am now a bureaucrat, with a tie and a paunch,
and the young, pursuing their dreams, are sometimes angry
when I check the rule book and tell them the
entrance requirements have been changed. I do it
to feed my children, just as the men in blue did.
But I want you to know the rivers still flow
as it did then, the Potomac, with its cherry blossoms.
History is yours now. Be careful with it. Be ready
when your turn comes, as it may, to save the world,
and know that we tried, and though we didn't
get it all done, all I can tell you is that
we found out trying is something, after all.

  vaucluse
 

In the closed vale,
                             my sweet brother, the swallows
are doing their silent work without complaint.
They are like you; wherever they are the people
are made happier, and everything becomes
much cleaner, as after April rains. It was
April, you know, when you chose to leave me here,
and all your friends, and the long nights of talking
of glorious ancients, and of the fathers of sad
spurned faith, and poor neglected Rome.
Even so was it April when my heart,
as you know, left me for another, never to return
while I have life, so that every laurel
and every breeze might mock my emptiness,
and my soul hung like a green leaf before
the breath of crowds; my reputation was their toy
and their laughter blew me about upon the branch
till I, brown and sere, fell upon the stream
and drifted here, deep in the shadows of my own
closed vale, my sweet brother, that is so like
me, for its hidden spring weeps in winter
and in summer, without end. But you
have been a comfort to me; whether here,
nesting like a swallow in the cliff above
the east bank of the green and tumbling stream;
or far below, in the dusty-throated Babylon
on the plain: a counter to the madness
and corruption of that place, and a complement
of cheerful sufficiency in the other, always
helpful in my crazed efforts to placate
the nymphs of the vale, while honoring the muses
that always make them jealous, so that every
meadow, every garden we built there
was swept away within the year; their fury
undiminished till complete; their victory
leaving no sign of all that I -- that we
had striven to plant or build to beautify
our memories of that place. And just as our gardens
were swept away by the jealous nymphs, I feel
you too have been stolen -- by a jealous God. Please,
my sweet brother, bear with me, for I feel
swollen with sorrows, but I mean no blasphemy!
Does not the Father of Heaven himself say,
"I am a jealous God"? and he takes away
the best, always, because the best is right
for him to take. And I know that it is God
that has taken you, and not some gang of monks
whose heaven is an inn, and whose God
is carried within the circle of their belts!
Rather, I know it is God because only the Father
inspires the life of the silent men, whom you
have been inspired to join with, not a rabble
of cenobitic share-alls, grubbing each
at the other's blanket under a common roof,
breathing garlic in one another's ears
the whole night long, and begging for new wine
or chasing women all the day, making
the name of Christ a joke to the common people,
so that when these beggars go out for alms,
a man may say to them, "What! You here again?"
and call some poor fellow from the ditch
and give the alms to him instead, saying
"Here! In Mohammed's name, for he truly
is stronger than the Christ these fellows talk of!"
But your order, an eremetic city set
on a hill, is cleanly, faithful, quiet, and strong
in the kindly works of our Lord. They and you
are so alike, how could it have been otherwise?
Thus do I say, a jealous God took you,
for he could not bear this filthy world should hold
such a one another day. All
my friends are like you in this; the Lord loves
them all too well; he takes them, one by one;
Remember Parma? It was there, you know,
by the bench I told you I'd had built,
that I, one day, was weeding among the bulbs,
near enough to the little brook to hear
its crystal song above the deeper roar
of the famous city so close by, and a darkness
came and stood upon that bridge, and I
looked up and into that darkness, as I have done
so often at the mouth of the fountain here
(for I am not afraid of caves and darkness,
and love to walk at night, even when
there is no moon), and saw therein our friend,
Giacomo Colonna, striding across
where that branch of the plane tree dips so closely
to the pool, between the bench and the wall.
I greeted him, surprised, and most concerned,
for he was hurrying along, and had no company,
and seemed as if he would not -- could not -- tarry.
He smiled, yet would not be embraced, and said
(I will never forget his words then!),
"Don't you recall the awful storms along
the baleful crest of the high Pyranees?
You hated them; so did I, and now
I am leaving those places forever: I am for Rome."
I wanted to go with him, but he was so stern
it made me afraid to speak; it was clear
that he would not have me go, so I looked
closely on him, to fix his beloved features
forever in my mind, and it was then
that I saw how pale he was, and knew that he
was dead. I have said elsewhere that this
was in a dream, but already I am not so sure.
Colonna died that very day, you know;
So I feel I really saw him. But you I never
see now, asleep or awake, but only remember.
Even as I write, I remember,
and it seems as though I might shape you
with my words. I see you as you were
when we braved the craggy slopes so high
above this shady valley, when we were young.
You took the straight path as it lay before you,
up and over all obstacles,
no matter how fearsome, and never stopped till you
had reached the appointed goal. You were then
just as you are; that is why God loves you
best! While I, wandering this way and that,
sought to take a path that looked the easiest,
but found to my chagrin it turned downhill.
I was lucky to reach the top at all,
but I did! I did! You cannot deny it, brother.
And it was I who brought our precious saint,
Augustinus, with us all that way.
The clouds were lower down, with the late sun
bright on their broad fleecy backs, and the Alps
shone far to the south, between us and
our father-country Italia, and the sea.
At our feet, so near it seemed a dream,
the Rhone, gleaming, in its bed of stones.
All this was first yours, but also mine,
and I brought forth Augustinus from my breast
and gave his benediction to that day:
that men wander through the world gazing
upon the high mountain tops, the great
ocean waves and deeply springing rivers,
and the slow-turning canopy of bright stars,
yet never think to look upon their souls.
This you have done; but this, I fear, I fear
to do, or rather wish to do but always turn
just as I reach the heavenly door, to seek
some easier-seeming path, some flowered way,
and always find, as on that peak, my way
leading down, toward some darkened place.
God be my witness, I often try to turn
there on my pleasant-seeming path, back
to the place where last I saw the door, but it
by then is gone, and nothing there I find
but a smooth expanse of bramble-covered wall.
And now you write to me and say the things
I have so often told myself, troubled,
as you must believe, beyond the common run
of men in sin! Brother, I have even
made a small book wherein I keep
my lapses and successes; already once
I kept myself safe for two years
and seven months; now, it is true, the priest
to whom I go for confession is kept busy,
but I trust the Lord will give me strength.
In living alone, as you know by now, there is
much to be gained. I have here the two
faithful servants and the dog, and visitors
come, but not too often, and the people
of the valley seem to regard me as their judge,
but I do have, as you have seen for yourself,
a space to myself within the walls of my
small house, south windowed, and endowed with one
extravagant-seeming thing: a good scriptorum.
Nearby are the books, my closest friends: they
(Virgil, Cicero, Livy, and the rest,
and Augustinus, my advisor and true
confessor) open continually their great treasures
to me, and through me, to all the world beside.
Do you not rise and pray in the midst of night
that all the saints may bless the wide world?
And the scripture says, "the heartfelt prayer
of a righteous man effecteth much." So too
you pour out the treasures of heaven on
the earth, as I unearth and bring to light
the gold and silver of the past! Brother,
my work is not so unlike yours...except,
of course, that I am able to put my name
on all my little productions! I do admit,
to you, now, dear heart, that I desire
greatly to see my name remembered -- God
forgive this! I see two thirsts in me: the one
to live forever in a name above
the common herd; the other, to nurse along
the hurt that blind boy gave me, years ago
when I was least prepared to defend myself.
Yes, I am still thirsting! Only those
who have never seen her cannot understand!
The light foliage of her hair, the dark
contrasting brows...the all-destroying twin
suns burning in her face, that should
have killed me long since, but Fortune
preserved me, for they have been oft averted;
while my own eyes looked everywhere that she,
I knew, was not, and found her in stones and winds
and even among the roots of trees along
the storm-scoured banks of the river Sorgue.
I have sat upon the grass at midnight
and rained tears on my own breast, because
the stars, so like her in their shining,
wheeled by beyond my reach, as thoughtless
of my suffering as she! And it seems
to me now these two thirsts are one
in some way: that as the light-limbed goddess
vanished, and in her place stood rooted forever
the dreamless, unapproachable laurel tree,
Apollo might have lifted a storm-stolen
branch with which to weave himself a crown
for remembrance; so with me, for to console
myself that tears and smiles, and even my poems,
moved not one, though they move all others,
I might, somewhere along the Appian Way,
pluck some branch of the very tree of hate
and, weaving it round my brows, make it
forever after my crown of love. The Africa
will earn me this, though it is already mine,
but I have begun, my brother, to gather the scattered
leaves that the winds of Love have brought me here
and elsewhere -- if it must be pain, then let the pain
be famed! Famed in France and Italy, and even
as far as the shores walked by Scipio, or
the mountains beyond the sacred land where Christ
walked along the Galilean strand.
Is this dreaming? Perhaps I have dreamed it all;
some will say: "this man invents everything
he says has happened to him"; but, brother,
you know I speak to you truly from the heart,
this heart that is not mine but another's,
for you yourself once loved truly one
who now has gone beyond you and the grave.
What is life? They, the crowd, never
ask, but I have asked, all my days,
and now I tell you what even the ancients most
desired to know, yet never found: this life
of man is a kind of dreaming, whether awake
or sleeping. He rises in a dream, and dresses
with dreaming hands. In the field he dreams of grain,
and at his nets he catches silver dreams.
He looks but cannot see, and hears but nothing
hears, as our blessed Lord tells us; there is
nothing between a man and a man but words,
and our words are all, and only, stuff of dreams.
I make myself in books, brother, because
I want my dreams to go on living yet,
and I know no other way. Is this so evil?
I will tell you more when I come, dear brother,
for I desire much to see you, and
observe the true monastic rule, some days
or even weeks, if the Abbott will allow.
I close by appending a copy of the first
leaf that drifted from my pain, back
to my door here in the wild, so that I might
weave it in the crown that now I wear
here in the closed vale, where it is always
winter in my soul without you, dear brother.

(sonnetto)

 Apollo, if yet lives the beautiful desire
that set you aflame by the Thessalian coast,
and if your love for the blonde tresses
amid wheeling years, has not found oblivion

 through slow ice and sharp, wicked time
enduring while your face yet seems obscured,
protect this loved and sacred foliage
by which first you and then I were caught;

 and by the virtue of that hope of love
that kept you up despite your life of pain,
completely clear the air of all falsehood;

 we may then both see a wonder in the same way:
seated, our lady, upon the grass
making, with her arms, her own shade.