Who can impair thee, mighty King
in unwearying descent
carries down the soil
of ravaged uplands, waste
and acid from the strip mines,
poisons of our false
prosperity. What mind
regains of clarity
mourns, the current a slow
cortege of everything
that we have given up,
the materials of Creation
wrecked, the strewed substance
of our trust and dignity.
But on still afternoons
of summer, the water’s face
recovers clouds, the shapes
of leaves. Maple, willow,
sycamore stand light
and easy in their weight,
their branching forms formed
on the water, and yellow
warbler, swallow, oriole
stroke their deft flight
through the river’s serene reflection
of the sky, as though, corrupted,
it shows the incorrupt.
Is this memory or promise?
What is anger beside it?
It is unfinished. It will not
be finished. And a man’s life
will be, although his work
will not, nor his desire
for clarity. Beside
this dark passage of water
I make my work, lifework
of many lives that has
no end, for it takes circles
of years, of birth and death
for pattern, eternal form
visible in mystery.
It takes for pattern the heavenly
and earthly song of which
it is a part, which holds it
from despair: the joined voices
of all things, all muteness
vocal in their harmony.
For that, though none can hear
or sing it all, though I
must by nature fail,
my work has turned away
the priced infinity
of mechanical desire.
This work that many loves
inspire teaches the mind
resemblance to the earth
in seasonal fashioning,
departures and returns
of song. The hands strive
against their gravity
for envisioned lights and forms,
fallings of harmony;
they strive, fail at their season’s
end. The seasonless river
lays hand and handiwork
upon the world, obedient
to a greater Mind, whole
past holding or beholding,
in whose flexing signature
all the dooms assemble
and become the lives of things.