*
Off in woods
a field that was tilled
isn’t now: tall grass
decades deep, a caesura
birdsplit in the space
wind makes at the middle of continents.
Minnesota perhaps. Far enough,
his axe blazed the four corners,
making his own space his.
Ploughed it. At its edge
sighted his furrow on white birch
in the elm dark, the wheat
climbed his sleep
tensed as rigging.
By the stream. His face
swims there, child again
in the old speech.
As if any thing were finished,
summer gone, snow falling forever.
The magnolia stands
in pink fallen petals, a girl
shedding clothing.
Crossed the field,
sat by the water sighting
a boat come to shore –
crossed masts caught in the hawk’s span
slid through his memory.
Blue jay, kestrel a rag in air,
the pheasant’s yell wakens him,
rusty wheel through the bracken.
For him the wheel turned.
For him the corn the wind bowed
groaned in the millwheel,
In his ship on the pool
sails of a child’s puzzle
assembling into a landscape.
He is standing again
at the seaport weeping,
the ship crowding sail
prowling over him.
*
Where he ran,
bare heels through cowclap.
In the pond scrubbed himself naked.
Shy, nervous,
she’d not take her knickers off,
lay for him in the deep leaves.
It’s not innocence
the fathers suffer from,
crouched in the birches, watching.
Then all his life scowling,
darker, cursing the crushed thumb,
land always resisting, forest
pushing in, pushed back
his share of winters. Years
distance lengthens down he recalls
her white thighs, peach fur
of her arms round him, pink moment
of her breasts spring wakens
year by year in the magnolia.
No use now he worked, broke
stone’s weight dragging
harrow and plough. That he got sons
to farm after, fight,
curse him in snarls
they’d gotten from Vikings,
that their women toughened
and won’t take his handswipe,
all means nothing. That the last
among byres and chickenshit,
the life grudged out of him
means no more. Though I can’t hear
their immigrant speech, can’t see
their scowl from the house
wanting me gone, there’s some thickening
of air I walk through.
No use to die broken. No use
holding on to what suffering
holds us.
I am a cry among cries
in the field where I dance.
*
Hawk born from the wolf’s mouth
Among sumacs, grey men
pushing their young before them
into the clearing, goldenrod, milkweed,
the space always mine now.
There is the young grass
shined by the wind, sun’s broad light
as it was in the field
once when I was wolf.
Seeds passed, tumbling
their ways to wherever, the air
bringing smell of my brothers,
striking the howl in me.
I ran, the leaf shadows on me.
Bird crossed me, its shadow
swallowing the gnat’s shadow,
above me the hawk’s flight
formed in the updraught. I ran
through thin woods across water
the light trembled over,
*
Concerning the clearing
I carved faces in stumps. I set them to watch the clearing below the stream and pond. I set them at the corners where the man that farmed that field had stood watching his crops under the weather. That man was long dead, leaving his litter of chickenwire and bolts, a tip of tax demands and foreclosures and smashed furniture, the house as he had lived in it and died, gone to mildew, yellowed out. In the field he had cleared was one great stone he had never moved, a granite thumb. All his grown life he cursed it. He would stand on it, a man cut off by the tide, safe on his rock.
An immigrant, a Swede. A man breaking his fingers on stones he dragged off. In the dark house of stones: his woman, his sons, his daughter. A living somehow, farming the woods, turning the stream for dam and pond, lugging stones into walls. The thumbnail blackened and fell off. Cows mooned through the trees, huge and nun-like, breaking sticks, lowing before rain. Pigs, chickens, a turkey for Thanksgiving, a goose for Christmas. They were there perhaps two generations, their last efforts abandoned chicken coops, the barn fallen thick with briars, the space of a small kitchen garden, abandoned. Old iron implements shedding into rust, the soil faintly red, grainy flakes.
Up Bjorgen’s Road above the city by the nuns’ house. The place is secret, mine despite the little red ribbons marking off the plots that will be houses, developments on the edge of town. A place of private rituals and the continuing presences of those who called it their own, a space amongst others I can open in my mind to walk there, to return, all my days, where my mind briefly cleared of all its luggage and the hawk turned sunward.
A field of grass. A long slope the sumacs advance across. Through the elms the white glint of birches.
*
Water’s quick tongue
keeping its skin
of shaking branch, sky, reflection
waterbugs stride on, leaf floats.
I am where I am some animal
hunkering down in itself
to drink at the stream and stare
the unbreakable silence down.
Where the birds settle –
woodpecker’s throb, dove’s moan,
the cardinal’s blood jet
as it would be without me.
To be still, a grassblade
dividing the wind, a monk hears it
steering his ship of the quiet,
his ear cupped to the stars,
in the ringing anvil of space
a bird with the birds. Three there were
at tree height driving the hawk off
his wings thrashing out sound
not part of him, not built
to fly among crow nests but hungry,
weary, wrong-muscled,
grey bird of my death
folding himself in the tree
a long moment above me hiding
demanding my silence, the watcher
watched. He stares now
in my mind catching his breath
into me, as if he were my death.
Flies again, driven out, crows
*
Elm, birch, evergreen
above snow’s remnants, the young firs
lost in spring, leaves
clenched through frost, folding out.
Among birches, families of five
sprung together, some lost
and some winter broken, survivors
gathered in old parchments, their skins’
weathered alphabets, pitted bark
of lost writing, lost marks,
a language left in the baggage trains,
stolen from docksides.
Tell me it’s so. We remember.
Tell me someone remembering us
sitting out in the last woods
warms our old cheeks.
In water, in the greenness
under reflections I’m stolen away
waking years later among elm roots
again nodding to the ferns.
And speak again. Or nothing.
Or, children, holding the cup
drink from it, in a kingdom
to which I was travelling.