New Collected Poems (28 page)

Dear Hayden, when I read your book I was aching

in head, back, heart, and mind, and aching

with your aches added to my own, and yet for joy

I read on without stopping, made eager

by your true mastery, wit, sorrow, and joy,

each made true by the others. My reading done,

I swear I am feeling better. Here in Port Royal

I take off my hat to you up there in Munnsville

in your great dignity of being necessary. I swear

it appears to me you're one of the rare fellows

who may finally amount to something. What shall

I say? I greet you at the beginning of a great career?

No. I greet you at the beginning, for we are

either beginning or we are dead. And let us have

no careers, lest one day we be found dead in them.

I greet you at the beginning that you have made

authentically in your art, again and again.

Sits level,

fills silently,

overflows,

makes music.

A shower like a little song

Overtook him going home,

Wet his shoulders, and went on.

A young man's love is bitter love

For what he must forego,

For what he ignorantly would have,

Desires but does not know.

The years, the years will teach him joys

That are more bitter still;

What in his having he forgoes

He has imagined well.

When I cannot be with you

I will send my love (so much

is allowed to human lovers)

to watch over you in the dark—

a winged small presence

who never sleeps, however long

the night. Perhaps it cannot

protect or help, I do not know,

but it watches always, and so

you will sleep within my love

within the room within the dark.

And when, restless, you wake

and see the room palely lit

by that watching, you will think,

“It's only dawn,” and go

quiet to sleep again.

We lay in our bed as in a tomb

awakened by thunder to the dark

in which our house was one with night,

and then light came as if the black

roof of the world had cracked open,

as if the night of all time had broken,

and out our window we glimpsed the world

birthwet and shining, as even

the sun at noon had never made it shine.

When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst

whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old,

thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall

gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not

J
OHN
21:18

 

I was at home alone. He came

to fight, as I had known he would.

The war in Vietnam was on;

I'd spoken out, opposing it—

and so, I thought, embarrassed him.

Not because he loved the war.

He feared for me, or for himself

in me. Fear angered him. He was

my enemy; his mind was made

up like a fist. He sat erect

on the chair's edge as on a horse,

would not take off his coat.

That was his way. My house was not

a house in which he would consent

to make himself at home that day.

The argument was hard and hot.

Tempered alike, we each knew where

the other's hide was tenderest.

We went past reason and past sense

by way of any eloquence

that hurt. He leaned. I saw the brown

spot in the blue of his right eye.

Forefinger hooking through the air,

he said I had been led astray,

beguiled, by he knew who, by God!

And was I then to be his boy

forever? Or his equal? Or

his foe? His equal and his foe?

By grace (I think it must have been

by grace) I told him what I knew:

“Do you know who has been, by God,

the truest teacher in my life

from the beginning until now?”

“
Who
, by God?”

“
You
, by God!”

He wept and said, “By God, I'm proud.”

He was, in his strength, the most feeling

and the most demanding man

I have ever known. I knew at first

only the difficulty of his demand,

but now I know the fear in it.

He has been afraid always of the loss

of precious things. We live in time

as in hard rain, and have no shelter,

half hopeless in anxiety for the young,

half hopeless in compassion for the old.

The generations fail and we forget

what we were, and are. The earth,

even, is flowing away. And where

is the stay against indifference?

I know his fear now by my own.

Precious things are being lost.

My grandfather, in the lost tongue

of his kind and time, called drawers

“draws.” My father pronounced the word

that way himself from time to time

in commemoration. And now another

time had come. I diapered him

like a child and helped him go

with short slow steps to bed. Meaning

to invoke his old remembrance

to cheer him, I said, “Don't lose

your draws.” “We miss him, don't we?”

he said. “Yes,” I said. “Yes,” he said.

Sometimes we do not know what time he's in

Or if he is in time. The dead live in his mind.

They wait beyond his sight, made radiant by his long

Unchanging love, as by the mercy and the grace

Of God. At night I help him to lie down upon

That verge we reach by generation and by day.

He says that, though we sleep, we love eternally.

He dreamed there was a storm

And all was overturned.

In his great need he called

His mother and his father

To help him, and one he'd known

But did not know found him

On the dark stair, led him

Back to his bed. Next day,

The dream still near, he said,

In longing of this world

That in the next is joy,

“If I could have found Papa,

I'd have been so comforted.”

I imagine him as he must appear

to his father and mother now,

if from the world of the dead they see

him as he now is—an old man

sliding his feet along the floor

in little childish steps. I imagine

that they call him “child,” and pity

him, and love him as they did,

for they are senior to him still,

having gone through the dark door,

and learned the hard things and the good

that only the dead can know.

And I imagine that they know also

the greater good, that we long for

but cannot know, that knows

of all our sorrow, and rejoices still.

Sometimes in sleeping he forgets

That he is old and, waking up,

Intends to go out in the world

To work, just as he did before—

Only to find that his body now

No longer answers to his will,

And his mind too is changed but not

By him. And then he rages in

His grief, and will not be consoled.

He cannot be consoled by us,

More mortal in our fewer years,

Who have not reached the limit he

Has come to, when immortal love

In flesh, denying time, will look

At what is lost, and grief fulfill

The budget of desire. Sometimes,

At home, he longs to be at home.

And sometimes he fulfills

What must have been the worst

Of all his fears: to be

An old man, fierce and foul,

Outraged and unforgiving,

One man alone, mere fact

Beyond the reach of love.

For fear this is his fate,

And mine if it is his,

I struggle with him. Thus

We ardently debate

The truth of fantasy

Empowered by wrath—the facts

He says are lies, the lies

He says are facts—his

Eyes in their conviction hard

To meet, hard to avoid.

We go into a place

Of ruin, where light obscures,

To the right place for us now

In our mad argument,

Exchanging foolish fire

In reasoned eloquence,

And winning no success.

We still are as we were,

And yet we do not fail,

For thus estranged we both

Oppose his loneliness.

The dead come near him in his sleep

And, waking, he calls out to them

To help him in his helplessness.

And though they in their distance keep

Silent, and give no help to him.

And do not answer his distress,

I hear him calling in my sleep

Among the living in the dim

House, where he calls in loneliness.

I go to help him in the deep

Night, waked and walking in whose time?

I am the brother called in darkness.

We watch the TV show,

Smooth faces and smooth talk

Made for everywhere,

Thus alien everywhere.

In deference to old age

And time, we sit down for

What no one can stand up for.

I wish him out of it,

That man-made other world.

I wish undone his absence

In body and in thought

From open countryside,

Our local air and light.

To honor him aright

I call him back to mind,

Remember him again

When he was my age now,

And straighter-backed than I,

Still hungry for the world.

His mind was then an act

Accomplished soon as thought,

Though now his body serves

Unwillingly at best

His mind's unresting will.

I summon him away

From time and heaviness.

I see him as he was.

The light is low and red upon the fields,

The mists are rising in the long hollow,

The shadows have stretched out, and he comes walking

In deep bluegrass that silences his steps.

Elated and upright, he walks beneath

The walnut trees around the spring. His work

Is done, the office shut and still, his chair

Empty. And now at his long shadow's foot,

He comes to salt the ewe flock, and to hear

The meadowlarks sing in the evening quiet.

He calls his sheep, who know his voice and come,

Crowding up to him as the light departs

And earth's great shadow gathers them in. White