once upon his shadow,
is gone. The watcher is left
in all silence, as after
thunder, or threat. And then
in the top of the sycamore
the redbird opens again
his clear song: Even
so. Even so.
Divided by little songs
these silences keep folding
back upon themselves
like long cloths put away.
They are all of the one
silence that precedes
and follows us. Too much
has fallen silent here.
There are names that rest
as silent on their stone
as fossils in creek ledges.
There are those who sleep
in graves no one remembers;
there is no language here,
now, to speak their names.
Too much of our history
will seem to have taken place
in the halls of capitals,
where the accusers have
mostly been guilty, and so
have borne witness to nothing.
Whole lives of work are buried
hands fallen from helves.
What was memory is dust
now, and many a story
told in shade or by the fire
is gone with the old light.
On the courthouse shelves
the facts lie mute
upon their pages, useless
nearly as the old boundary
marks—“Beginning on
the bank of the Kentucky River
at the mouth of Cane Run
at a hackberry” (1865) —
lost in the silence of
old days and voices. And yet
the land and the mind
bear the marks of a history
that they do not record.
The mind still hungers
for its earth, its bounded
and open space, the term
of its final assent. It keeps
the vision of an independent
modest abundance. It dreams
of cellar and pantry filled,
the source well husbanded.
And yet it learns care
reluctantly, and late.
It suffers plaintively from
its obligations. Long
attention to detail
is a cross it bears only
It would like to hurry up
and get more than it needs
of several pleasant things.
It dreads all the labors
of common decency.
It recalls, with disquieting
sympathy, the motto
of a locally renowned
and long dead kinsman: “Never
set up when you can lay down.”
The land bears the scars
of minds whose history
was imprinted by no example
of a forebearing mind, corrected,
beloved. A mind cast loose
in whim and greed makes
nature its mirror, and the garden
falls with the man. Great trees
once crowded this bottomland,
so thick that when they were felled
a boy could walk a mile
along their trunks and never
set foot to ground. Where
that forest stood, the fields
grew fine crops of hay:
men tied the timothy heads
together across their horses’
withers; the mountains upstream
were wooded then, and the river
in flood renewed its fields
like the Nile. Given
a live, husbandly tradition,
have lasted. It did not.
One lifetime of our history
ruined it. The slopes
of the watershed were stripped
of trees. The black topsoil
washed away in the tracks
of logger and plowman.
The creeks, that once ran clear
after the heaviest rains,
ran muddy, dried in summer.
From year to year watching
from his porch, my grandfather
saw a barn roof slowly
come into sight above
a neighboring ridge as plows
and rains wore down the hill.
This little has been remembered.
For the rest, one must go
and ponder in the silence
of documents, or decipher
on the land itself the healed
gullies and the unhealed,
the careless furrows drawn
over slopes too steep to plow
where the scrub growth
stands in vision’s failure now.
Such a mind is as much
a predicament as such
a place. And yet a knowledge
is here that tenses the throat
as for song: the inheritance
of the ones, alive or once
the ones I have imagined,
who took into their minds
the troubles of this place,
blights of love and race,
but saw a good fate here
and willingly paid its cost,
kept it the best they could,
thought of its good,
and mourned the good they lost.