is ahead of us when we wake.
Cleared, the field must be
kept clear. There are more
clarities to make.
The farm is an infinite form.
Thinking of what may come,
I wake up in the night
and cannot go back to sleep.
The future swells in the dark,
too large a room for one
man to sleep well in.
I think of the work at hand.
Before spring comes again
there is another pasture
to clear and sow, for an end
I desire but cannot know.
Now in the silent keep
of stars and of my work
I lay me down to sleep.
The deepest sleep holds us
to something immutable.
We have fallen
into place, and harmony
surrounds us. We are carried
in the world, in the company
of stars. But as dawn comes
I feel the waking of my hunger
for another day. I weave
round it again the kindling
tapestry of desire.
My life’s wave is at its crest.
The thought of work becomes
a friend of the thought of rest.
I see how little avail
one man is, and yet I would not
be a man sitting still,
no little song of desire
traveling the mind’s dark woods.
I am trying to teach my mind
to bear the long, slow growth
of the fields, and to sing
of its passing while it waits.
The farm must be made a form,
endlessly bringing together
heaven and earth, light
and rain building, dissolving,
building back again
the shapes and actions of the ground.
If it is to be done,
not of the body, not of the will
the strength will come,
but of delight that moves
lovers in their loves,
that moves the sun and stars,
that stirs the leaf, and lifts
the hawk in flight.
From the crest of the wave
the grave is in sight,
the soul’s last deep track
in the known. Past there
it gives up roof and fire,
It returns to the wild,
where nothing is done by hand.
I am trying to teach
my mind to accept the finish
that all good work must have:
of hands touching me,
days and weathers passing
over me, the smooth of love,
the wearing of the earth.
At the final stroke
I will be a finished man.
Little farm, motherland, made
by what has nearly been your ruin,
when I speak to you, I speak
to myself, for we are one
body. When I speak to you,
I speak to wife, daughter, son,
whom you have fleshed in your flesh.
And speaking to you, I speak
to all that brotherhood that rises
daily in your substance
and walks, burrows, flies, stands:
plants and beasts whose lives
loop like dolphins through your sod.
Going into the city, coming
home again, I keep you
always in my mind.
Who knows me who does not
know you? The crowds of the streets
do not know that you
are passing among them with me.
They think I am simply a man,
made of a job and clothes
and education. They do not
see who is with me,
or know the resurrection
by which we have come
from the dead. In the city
we must be seemly and quiet
as becomes those who travel
among strangers. But do not
on that account believe
that I am ashamed
to acknowledge you, my friend.
We will write them a poem
to tell them of the great
membership, the mystic order,
to which both of us belong.
When I think of death I see
that you are but a passing thought
poised upon the ground,
held in place
by vision, love, and work,
all as passing as a thought.
Beginning and end
thread these fields like a net.
Nosing and shouldering,
the field mouse pats
his anxious routes through the grass,
the mole his cool ones
among the roots; the air
is tensely woven of bird flight,
the mind of the honeybee
is the map of bloom.
Like a man, the farm is headed
for the woods. The wild
is already veined in it
everywhere, its thriving.
To love these things one did not
intend is to be a friend
to the beginning and the end.
And when we speak together,
love, our words rise
like leaves, out of our fallen
words. What we have said
becomes an earth we live on
like two trees, whose sheddings
enrich each other, making
both the source of each.
When we love, the green
stalks and downturned bells
of lilies grow from our flesh.
Dreams and visions flower
from those beds our bodies are.
The farm travels in snow,
a little world flying
through the Milky Way.
The flakes all fall
into place. But already
the mind begins to shift
to receive anew the old fate
of spring. In all the fields
and woods, old work calls
to new. The dead and living
prepare again to mate.
Let the great song come
that sways the branches, that weaves
the nest of the vireo,
that the ground squirrel dreams
in his deep sleep, and wakes,
that the fish hear, that pipes
the minnows over
the shoals. In snow I wait
and sing of the braided
song I only partly hear.
Even in the rising year,
even in the spring,
the little can hope to sing
only in praise of the great.