For Hayden Carruth
box elder, redbud, whitehaw,
locust thicket, all trees
that follow man’s neglect,
through snarls and veils
of honeysuckle, tangles
of grape and bittersweet,
sing, steel, the hard song
of vision cutting in.
Vision must have severity
at its edge:
against neglect,
bushes grown over the pastures,
vines riding down
the fences, the cistern broken;
against the false vision
of the farm dismembered,
sold in pieces on the condition
of the buyer’s ignorance,
a disorderly town
of “houses in the country”
inhabited by strangers;
against indifference, the tracks
of the bulldozer running
to gullies;
the dread of too much to do,
the wish to make desire
easy, the thought of rest.
“We don’t bother nobody,
and we don’t want nobody
to bother us,” the old woman
declared fiercely
over the fence. She stood
in strange paradise:
a shack built in the blast
of sun on the riverbank,
a place under the threat of flood,
bought ignorantly, not
to be bothered. And that
is what has come of it,
“the frontier spirit,” lost
in the cities, returning now
to be lost in the country,
obscure desire floating
like a cloud upon vision:
to be free of labor,
the predicament of other lives,
not to be bothered.
Vision reaches the ground
under sumac and thorn,
under the honeysuckle,
and begins its rise.
It sees clear pasture,
clover and grass, on the worn
hillside going back
to woods, good cropland
Through time, labor, the fret
of effort, it sees
cattle on the green slope
adrift in the daily current
of hunger. And vision
moderates the saw blade,
the intelligence
and mercy of that power.
Against nature, nature
will serve well enough
a man who does not ask too much.
We leave the walnut trees,
graces of the ground
flourishing in the air.
A man who does not ask too much
becomes the promise of his land.
His marriage married
to his place, he waits
and does not stray. He takes thought
for the return of the dead
to the ground that they may come
to their last avail,
for the rain
that it stay long in reach of roots,
for roots
that they bind the living
that it bring breath through the dark,
for love in whose keeping
bloom comes to light.
Singularity made him great
in his sight.
This union makes him small,
a part of what he would keep.
As the vision of labor grows
grows the vision of rest.
Weariness is work’s shadow.
Labor is no preparation
but takes life as it goes
and casts upon it
death’s shadow, which
enough weariness may welcome.
The body’s death rises
over its daily labor,
a tree to rest beneath.
But work clarifies
the vision of rest. In rest
the vision of rest is lost.
The farm is the proper destiny,
here now and to come.
Leave the body to die
in its time, in the final dignity
that knows no loss in the fallen
high horse of the bones.
In the predicament of other lives
we become mothers of calves,
teaching them, against nature,
to suck a bucket’s valved nipple,
caring for them like life
itself to make them complete
animals, independent
of the tit. Fidelity
reaches through the night
to the triumph of their lives,
bawling in the cold barn before
daylight—to become, eaten,
the triumph of other lives
perhaps not worthy of them,
eaters who will recognize
only their own lives
in their daily meat.
But no matter. Life
must be served. Wake up,
leave the bed, dress
in the cold room, go under
stars to the barn, come
to the greetings of hunger,
the breath a pale awning
in the dark. Feed
the lives that feed
lives.
When one sickens
do not let him die. Hold out
that would let its life go
in the cold night. While he lives
a thought belongs to him
that will not rest. And then
accept the relief of death.
Drag the heedless carcass
out of the stall, fling it
in the bushes, let it
lie. Hunger will find it,
the bones divide by stealth,
the black head with its star
drift into the hill.
Street, guns, machines,
quicker fortunes, quicker deaths
bear down on these
hills whose winter trees
keep like memories
the nests of birds. The arrival
may be complete in my time,
and I will see the end
of names. The history
of lives will end then,
the building and wearing away
of earth and flesh will end,
and the history of numbers
will begin. Then why clear
yet again an old farm
scarred by the lack of sight
that scars our souls?
The struggle is on, no
mistake, and I take
the side of life’s history
against the coming of numbers.
Make clear what was overgrown.
Cut the brush, drag it
through sumac and briars, pile it,
clear the old fence rows,
the trash dump, stop
the washes, mend the galls,
fence and sow the fields,
bring cattle back to graze
the slopes, bring crops back
to the bottomland. Here
where the time of rain is kept
take what is half ruined
and make it clear, put it
back in mind.
February. A cloudy day
foretelling spring by its warmth
though snow will follow.
You are at work in the worn field
returning now to thought.
The sorrel mare eager
to the burden, you are dragging
cut brush to the pile,
moving in ancestral motions
of axe-stroke, bending
to log chain and trace, speaking
immemorial bidding and praise
to the mare’s fine ears.
And you pause to rest
in the quiet day while the mare’s
sweated flanks steam.
You stand in a clearing whose cost
you know in tendon and bone.
A kingfisher utters
his harsh cry, rising
Again, again, the old
is newly come.
We pile the brush high,
a pyre of cut trees,
not to burn as the way
once was, but to rot and cover
an old scar of the ground.
The dead elm, its stump
and great trunk too heavy to move,
we give to the riddance of fire.
Two days, two nights
it burns, white ash falling
from it light as snow.
It goes into the air.
What bore the wind
the wind will bear.
An evening comes
when we finish work and go,
stumblers under the folding sky,
the field clear behind us.