NORTHFIELD POEMS (1966)
to Blanche and W. M. Ammons
I can’t understand it
said the giant redwood
I have attained height and distant view,
am easy with time,
5and yet you search the
wood’s edge
for weeds
that find half-dark room in margins
of stone
10and are
as everybody knows
here and gone in a season
O redwood I said in this matter
I may not be able to argue from reason
15but preference sends me stooping
seeking
the least,
as finished as you
and with a flower
1964 (1964)
There was a hill once wanted
to become a mountain
and
forces underground helped it
5lift itself
into broad view
and noticeable height:
but the green hills around and even
some passable mountains,
10diminished by white,
wanted it down
so the mountain, alone, found
grandeur taxing and
turned and turned
15to try to be concealed:
oh but after the rock is
massive and high . . . !
how many centuries of rain and
ice, avalanche
20and shedding shale
before the dull mound
can yield to grass!
1964 (1964)
The wind
rounding the gap
found me there
weeping under a
5Joshua tree
and Oh I said
I am mortal all right
and cannot live,
by roads
10stopping to wait
for no one coming,
moving on
to dust
and burned weeds,
15having no liturgy,
no pilgrim
from my throat
singing wet news of joy,
no dome, alabaster wall,
20no eternal city:
the wind said
Wayfaring and wandering
is not for mortals
who should raise
25the cock
that cries their
dawns in and
cannot always be coming to un-
broken country:
30settle here
by this Joshua tree
and make a well:
unlike wind
that dies and
35never dies I said
I must go on
consigned to
form that will not
let me loose
40except to death
till some
syllable’s rain
anoints my tongue
and makes it sing
45to strangers:
if it does not rain
find me wasted by roads:
enter angling through
my cage
50and let my ribs
sing me out.
1958 (1959)
I found a
weed
that had a
mirror in it
5and that
mirror
looked in at
a mirror
in
10me that
had a
weed in it
1963 (1965)
When I go back of my head
down the cervical well, roots
branch
thinning, figuring
5into flesh
and flesh
glimmers with man-old fires
and ghosts
hollowing up into mind
10cry from ancient narrowing
needle-like caves:
a depth of contact there you’d
think would hold, the last
nerve-hair
15feeding direct from
meat’s indivisible stuff:
but what we ride on makes us ride
and rootless mind
in a thundering rove
20establishes, disposes:
rocks and clouds
take their places:
or if place shifts by a sudden breaking
in of stars
25and mind whirls
where to go
then like a rabbit it
freezes in grass, order
as rock or star, to let whatever can, come,
30pass, pass over: somewhere another human
figure moves or rests, concern
for (or fear of) whom
will start and keep us.
1963 (1965)
When leaving the primrose, bayberry dunes, seaward
I discovered the universe this morning,
I was in no
mood
5for wonder,
the naked mass of so much miracle
already beyond the vision
of my grasp:
along a rise of beach, a hundred feet from the surf,
10a row of clam shells
four to ten feet wide
lay sinuous as far as sight:
in one shell—though in the abundance
there were others like it—upturned,
15four or five inches across the wing,
a lake
three to four inches long and two inches wide,
all dimensions rounded,
indescribable in curve:
20and on the lake a turning galaxy, a film of sand,
coordinated, nearly circular (no real perfections),
an inch in diameter, turning:
turning:
counterclockwise, the wind hardly perceptible from 11 o’clock
25with noon at sea:
the galaxy rotating,
but also,
at a distance from the shell lip,
revolving
30round and round the shell:
a gull’s toe could spill the universe:
two more hours of sun could dry it up:
a higher wind could rock it out:
the tide will rise, engulf it, wash it loose:
35utterly:
the terns, their
young somewhere hidden in clumps of grass or weed,
were diving sshik sshik at me
then pealing upward for another round and dive:
40I have had too much of this inexhaustible miracle:
miracle, this massive, drab constant of experience.
1962 (1964)
Water from the sprinkler
collects
in street-edge gravel and
makes rocky pools: birds
5materialize—puff, bathe
and drink: a green-black
grackle lopes, listing,
across the hot street, pecks
a starling, and drinks: a
10robin rears misty with
exultation: twittering comes
in bunches of starts and
flights: shadows pour
across cement and lawn: a
15turn of the faucet
dries every motion up.
1963 (1965)
To maintain balance
between one and many by
keeping in operation both one and many:
fear a too great consistency, an arbitrary
5imposition
from the abstract one
downwardly into the realities of manyness:
this makes unity
not deriving from the balance of manyness
10but by destruction of diversity:
it is unity
unavailable to change,
cut off from the reordering possibilities of
variety:
15when I tried to summarize
a moment’s events
along the creek shore this afternoon,
the tide gathering momentum outwardly,
terns
20hovering
dropping to spear shallow water,
the minnows
in a band
wavering between deep and shallow water,
25the sand hissing
into new images,
the grass at its sound and symmetry,
scoring
semicircles of wind
30into sand,
the tan beetle in a footprint dead,
flickering to
gusts of wind,
the bloodsucking flies
35at their song and savage whirl,
when I tried to think by what
millions of grains of events
the tidal creek had altered course,
when I considered alone
40a record
of the waves on the running blue creek,
I was released into a power beyond my easy failures,
released to think
how so much freedom
45can keep the broad look of serenity
and nearly statable balance:
not unity by the winnowing out of difference,
not unity thin and substanceless as abstraction,
uneventful as theory:
50I think of California’s towns and ranges,
deserts and oil fields,
highways, forests, white boulders,
valleys, shorelines,
headlands of rock;
55and of Maine’s
unpainted seahouses
way out on the tips of fingerlands,
lobster traps and pots,
freshwater lakes; of Chicago,
60hung like an eggsac on the leaf of Lake
Michigan, with
its
Art Museum, Prudential Building, Knickerbocker Hotel
(where Cummings stayed);
65of North Carolina’s
Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, outer banks, shoals,
telephone wire loads of swallows,
of Columbus County
where fresh-dug peanuts
70are boiled
in iron pots, salt filtering
in through boiled-clean shells (a delicacy
true
as artichokes or Jersey
75asparagus): and on and on through the villages,
along dirt roads, ditchbanks, by gravel pits and on
to the homes, to the citizens and their histories,
inventions, longings:
I think how enriching, though unassimilable as a whole
80into art, are the differences: the small-business
man in
Kansas City declares an extra dividend
and his daughter
who teaches school in Duquesne
85buys a Volkswagen, a second car for the family:
out of many, one:
from variety an over-riding unity, the expression of
variety:
no book of laws, short of unattainable reality itself,
90can anticipate every event,
control every event: only the book of laws founded
against itself,
founded on freedom of each event to occur as itself,
lasts into the inevitable balances events will take.
1962 (1965)
This October
rain
comes after fall
summer and
5drought
and is
a still rain:
it takes leaves
straight
10down: the
birches stand
in
pools of them-
selves, the yellow
15fallen
leaves reflecting
those on
the tree, that
mirror the ground.
1963 (1965)
A whirlwind in the fields
lifts sand
into its motions
to show, tight, small,
5the way it walks
through a summer day:
better take time to watch
the sand-shadow mist—
since every
10grain of sand
is being counted by the sun.
1964 (1965)
Consistencies rise
and ride
the mind down
hard routes
5walled
with no outlet and so
to open a variable geography,
proliferate
possibility, here
10is this dune fest
releasing
mind feeding out,
gathering clusters,
fields of order in disorder,
15where choice
can make beginnings,
turns,
reversals,
where straight line
20and air-hard thought
can meet
unarranged disorder,
dissolve
before the one event that
25creates present time
in the multi-variable
scope:
a variable of wind
among the dunes,
30making variables
of position and direction and sound
of every reed leaf
and bloom,
running streams of sand,
35winding, rising, at a depression
falling out into deltas,
weathering shells with blast,
striking hiss into clumps of grass,
against bayberry leaves,
40lifting
the spider from footing to footing
hard across the dry even crust
toward the surf:
wind, a variable, soft wind, hard
45steady wind, wind
shaped and kept in the
bent of trees,
the prevailing dipping seaward
of reeds,
50the kept and erased sandcrab trails:
wind, the variable to the gull’s flight,
how and where he drops the clam
and the way he heads in, running to loft:
wind, from the sea, high surf
55and cool weather;
from the land, a lessened breakage
and the land’s heat:
wind alone as a variable,
as a factor in millions of events,
60leaves no two moments
on the dunes the same:
keep
free to these events,
bend to these
65changing weathers:
multiple as sand, events of sense
alter old dunes
of mind,
release new channels of flow,
70free materials
to new forms:
wind alone as a variable
takes this neck of dunes
out of calculation’s reach:
75come out of the hard
routes and ruts,
pour over the walls
of previous assessments: turn to
the open,
80the unexpected, to new saliences of feature.
The reassurance is
that through change
continuities sinuously work,
85cause and effect
without alarm,
gradual shadings out or in,
motions that full
with time
90do not surprise, no
abrupt leap or burst: possibility,
with meaningful development
of circumstance:
when I went back to the dunes today,
95saliences,
congruent to memory,
spread firmingly across my sight:
the narrow white path
rose and dropped over
100grassy rises toward the sea:
sheets of reeds,
tasseling now near fall,
filled the hollows
with shapes of ponds or lakes:
105bayberry, darker, made wandering
chains of clumps, sometimes pouring
into heads, like stopped water:
much seemed
constant, to be looked
110forward to, expected:
from the top of a dune rise,
look of ocean salience: in
the hollow,
where a runlet
115makes in
at full tide and fills a bowl,
extravagance of pink periwinkle
along the grassy edge,
and a blue, bunchy weed, deep blue,
120deep into the mind the dark blue
constant:
minnows left high in the tide-deserted pocket,
fiddler crabs
bringing up gray pellets of drying sand,
125disappearing from air’s faster events
at any close approach:
certain things and habits
recognizable as
having lasted through the night:
130though what change in
a day’s doing!
desertions of swallows
that yesterday
ravaged air, bush, reed, attention
135in gatherings wide as this neck of dunes:
now, not a sound
or shadow, no trace of memory, no remnant
explanation:
summations of permanence!
140where not a single single thing endures,
the overall reassures,
deaths and flights,
shifts and sudden assaults claiming
limited orders,
145the separate particles:
earth brings to grief
much in an hour that sang, leaped, swirled,
yet keeps a round
quiet turning,
150beyond loss or gain,
beyond concern for the separate reach.
1962 (1966)
White, flipping
butterfly,
paperweight,
flutters by and
5over shrubs,
meets a binary
mate and they
spin, two orbits
of an
10invisible center;
rise
over the roof
and caught on
currents
15rise higher
than trees and
higher and up
out of sight,
swifter in
20ascent than they
can fly or fall.
1963 (1965)
Now you have come,
the roads
humbling your feet with dust:
I ask you to
5sit by this
spring:
I will wash your feet
with springwater
and silver care:
10I lift leaking handbowls
to your ankles:
O ablutions!
Who are you
sir
15who are my brother?
I dry your feet
with sweetgum
and mint leaves:
the odor of your feet
20is newly earthen,
honeysuckled:
bloodwork in blue
raisures over the white
skinny anklebone:
25if I have wronged you
cleanse me with the falling
water of forgiveness.
And woman, your flat feet
yellow, gray with dust,
30your orphaned udders flat,
lift your dress
up to your knees
and I will wash your feet:
feel the serenity
35cool as cool springwater
and hard to find:
if I have failed to know
the grief in your gone time,
forgive me wakened now.
1959 (1965)
All afternoon
the tree shadows, accelerating,
lengthened
till
5sunset
shot them black into infinity:
next morning
darkness
returned from the other
10infinity and the
shadows caught ground
and through the morning, slowing,
hardened into noon.
1964 (1964)
I.
It is not enough to be willing to come out of the dark
and stand in the light,
all hidden things brought into sight, the damp
black spaces,
5where fear, arms over its head, trembles into blindness,
invaded by truth-seeking light:
it is not enough to desire radiance, to be struck by
radiance: external light
throws darkness behind its brilliance, the division
10nearly half and half:
it is only enough when the inner light
kindles to a source, radiates from its sphere to all
points outwardly: then, though
surrounding things are half and half with
15light and darkness, all that is visible from the source
is light:
it is not enough to wish to cast light: as much
darkness as light is made that way: it is only
enough to touch the inner light of each surrounding thing
20and hope it will itself be stirred to radiance,
eliminating the shadows that all lights give it,
and realizing its own full sphere:
it is only enough to radiate the sufficient light
within, the
25constant source, the light beyond all possibility of night.
II.
However;
in separating light from darkness
have we cast into death:
in attaining the luminous,
30made, capable self,
have we
brought error
to perfection:
in naming have we divided what
35unnaming will not undivide:
in coming so far,
synthesizing, enlarging, incorporating, completing
(all the way to a finished Fragment)
have we foundered into arrival:
40in tarring, calking, timbering,
have we kept our ship afloat
only to satisfy all destinations
by no departures;
only to abandon helm,
45sailcloth, hemp, spar;
only to turn charts
to weather, compass to salt, sextant
to sea:
as far as words will let us go, we have
50voyaged: now
we disperse the ruin of our gains
to do a different kind of going
that will
become less and
55less
voyaging
as arrival approaches nowhere-everywhere
in gain of nothing-everything.
1962 (1964)
An orchestration of events,
memories,
intellections, of the wounds,
hard throats, the perils
5of the youthful private member:
a clustering of years into phrases,
motifs, a
keying to somber D-flat
or brilliant A:
10an emergence
of minor meanings,
the rising of flutes, oboes, bassoons:
percussion,
the critical cymbal
15crashing grief out
or like a quivering fan unfolding
into spirit:
the derelict breakage of days, weeks,
hours, re-organizing,
20orienting
to the riding movement,
hawklike,
but keener in wings,
in shadow deeper:
25a swerving into the underside
gathering
dream-images,
the hidden coursing of red-black cries,
darkness,
30the ghosts re-rising,
the eyeless, crippled, furious,
mangled ones:
then two motions like cliffs
opposing, the orchestration at
35first
too torn, but going back
finding new lights to doom
the dark resurrections
until the large curve of meaning
40stands apart
like a moon-cusp or horn
singing with a higher soundless sound.
1958 (1965)
When the storm passed,
we listened to rain-leavings,
individual drops in
fields of surprise;
5a drop here
in a puddle;
the clear-cracking
drop
against a naked root;
10by the window,
the muffled, elm-leaf drop,
reorganizing at the tip,
dropping in another
event to the ground:
15we listened and
liveliness broke
out at a thousand quiet
points.
1963 (1965)
I have been brought out of day,
out of the full dawn led away;
from the platform of noon
I have descended.
5To death, the diffuse one
going beside me, I said,
You have brought me out of day
and he said
No longer like the fields of earth
10may you go in and out.
I quarreled and devised a while
but went on
having sensed a nice dominion in the air,
the black so round and deep.
1951 (1965)
Underneath, the dunes
are solid,
frozen with rain
the sand
5held and let
go deep
without losing
till a clearing freeze
left water the keeper of sand:
10warm days since
have intervened,
softened
the surface,
evaporated
15the thaw
and let grains loose: now
the white grains drift against the dunes
and ripple as if in summer,
hiding the hard deep marriage
20of sand and ice:
fog lay thick here
most of the morning
but now lifting, rides
in low from the sea,
25filters inland through the dunes
but
over the warm and
sunny sand rising
loses its shape out of sight:
30the dense clumps of grass, bent
over,
still wet with fog,
drop
dark buttons of held fog on thin dry sand,
35separately, here, there, large drops,
another rainsand shape:
distant, the ocean’s breakers
merge into high splintering
sound,
40the wind low, even, inland, wet,
a perfect carriage
for resolved, continuous striving:
not the deep breakage and roar
of collapsing hollows:
45sound that creation may not be complete,
that the land may not have been
given
permanently,
that something remains
50to be agreed on,
a lofty burn of sound, a clamoring and
coming on:
how will the mix be
of mound and breaker,
55grain and droplet: how
long can the freeze hold, the wind lie,
the free sand
keep the deep secret: turn: the gold
grass will come
60green in time, the dark stalks of rushes
will settle
in the hollows, the ice bridge
dissolving, yielding
will leave solid
65bottom for summer fording: the black bushes
will leaf,
hinder
the sea-bringing wind: turn turn
here with these chances
70taken, here to take these chances: land winds will
rise, feed
back the sands, humble the breakers: today’s
high unrelenting cry will relent:
the waves will lap with broken, separate,
75quiet sounds:
let the thaw that will come, come: the dissolved
reorganizes
to resilience.
1963
In the desert a
clump of rocks
sang with hidden water:
I broke in &
5water spilled:
I planted trees:
wild animals from the hills
came at night
to tame water
10and stood still:
the air gathered
hoverings of birds
from
drought’s celestial trees:
15grass sprouted
and spangled into seed:
green reaches of
streams went out:
the rabbit that
20had visited,
dwelled:
this was a dream.
1964 (1966)
How, through what tube, mechanism,
unreal pass, does
the past get ahead of us
to become today?
5the dead are total mysteries, now:
their radiances,
unwaxed by flesh, are put out:
disintegrations
occur, the black kingdom separates, loses
10way, waters rush,
gravel pours—
faces loosen, turn, and move:
that fact, that edge to turn around!
senselessly, then,
15celebrant with obscure
causes, unimaginable means, trickles
of possibility, the cull beads
catch centers, round out,
luminescence stirs,
20circulates through dark’s depths
and there—all lost still lost—
the wells primed, the springs free,
tomorrow emerges and
falls back shaped into today.
1964 (1966)
Everything begins at the tip-end, the dying-out,
of mind:
the dazed eyes set and light
dissolves actual trees:
5the world beyond: tongueless,
unexampled
burns dimension out of shape,
opacity out of stone:
come: though the world ends and cannot
10end,
the apple falls sharp
to the heart starved with time.
1964 (1966)
I spent the day
differentiating
and wound up
with nothing
5whole to keep:
tree came apart from tree,
oak from maple, oak
from oak, leaf from leaf,
mesophyll cell
10from cell
and toward dark
I got lost between
cytoplasm’s grains
and vacuoles:
15the next day began
otherwise: tree
became plant, plant
and animal became
life: life & rock,
20matter: that
took up most of
the morning: after
noon, matter began
to pulse, shoot, to
25vanish in and out of
energy and
energy’s invisible
swirls confused, surpassed
me: from that edge
30I turned back,
strict with limitation,
to my world’s
bitter acorns
and sweet branch water.
1964 (1966)
From the dark
fragmentations
build me up
into a changed brilliant shape,
5realized order,
mind singing again
new song, moving into the slow beat and
disappearing beat
of perfect resonance:
10how many
times must I be broken and reassembled! anguish of becoming,
pain of moulting,
descent! before the unending moment of vision:
how much disorder must I learn to tolerate
15to find materials
for the new house of my sight!
arrange me
into disorder
near the breaking of the pattern
20but
should disorder start to
tear, the breaking down of possible return,
oh rise gleaming in recall,
sing me again towering remade, born into a wider
25order, structures deepening,
inching rootlike into the dark!
1959 (1965)
A silver jet,
riding the top of tundra clouds,
comes over
maybe from Rio:
5the aluminum sun shines
on it
as if it were a natural creature.
1964 (1965)
for JFK
1
drums gather and humble us beyond escape,
propound the single, falling fact:
time, suspended between memory and present,
hangs unmeasured, empty
2
5erect,
disciplined by cadence into direction, the soldier
obeys the forms of rumor:
the riderless horse,
restive with the pressure of held flight,
10tosses the hung bit,
worries the soldier’s tameless arm—
sidling, prances the energy out
3
ahead, unalterable, the fact proceeds,
and the bit holds:
15the fire-needle bites,
training the head on course
4
the light, determined rattle
of the caisson
breaking into sunlight
20through the crystal black ribbons of trees!
the slack traces,
weightlessness at the shoulders of horses!
5
if we could break free
and run this knowledge out,
25burst this energy of grief
through a hundred countrysides!
if bleak through the black night
we could outrun
this knowledge into a different morning!
6
30belief, light as a drumrattle,
touches us and lifts us into tears
1964 (1964)
Merging into place against a slope of trees,
I extended my arms and
took up the silence and spare leafage.
I lost my head first, the cervical meat
5clumping off in rot,
baring the spinal heart to wind and ice
which work fast.
The environment lost no self-possession.
In spring, termites with tickling feet
10aereated my veins.
A gall-nesting wren took my breath
flicking her wings, and
far into summer the termites found the heart.
No sign now shows the place,
15all these seasons since,
but a hump of sod below the leaves
where chipmunks dig.
The pebble spoke and down
came the sun
its plume
brushing through space as
5over smooth sea-reaching stream
bent reed
lets sodden leaf
arrow-ripples cut
and acorn husk wind-whirled
10ran out and caught the sun
in its burred cup
and said Look
to everyone standing on
edge of fern leaf watching
15the other edge
become imaginary as
waterbirds low-flying through
islands snake-long dark offshore
Acorn husk got
20no attention and even
the universe could sundering
hold no ear
What somebody asked did
the pebble say
25and sea colander washed
aland said Nothing
nothing exists
and everybody watched to
see if fern leaf could
30re-appear with its lost edge
and when
snow fell went in
1958
I sit in sun
light
on a white
yard-bench:
5the sparse great
oaks
cower the county
buildings:
a bumblebee
10works a head
of marigolds: the
jail back
there, keys rattle
a sheriff
15by:
people stand about
in twos and
threes talking,
waiting for
20court:
a drunk man
talks loud as
if sobering to
alarm:
25an acorn leaps
through leaves and
cracks the ground!
1963
In the dark original water,
amniotic infinity
closed
boundless in circularity:
5tame, heavy
water,
equilibriant,
any will forming to become—
consistency of motion
10arising—
annihilated
by its equal and opposite:
an even, complete extent:
(there
15an eden: how
foreign and far away
your death, rivulets
trickling
through ripe bowels,
20return to heavy water,
infinite multiplicity, in
the deepening, filtering
earthen womb
that bears you forever
25beyond
the amnion, O barrier!)
A warm unity, separable but
entire,
you the nucleus
30possessing that universe.
1960 (1964)
(as told me by an aunt)
In them days
they won’t hardly no way to know if
somebody way off
died
5till they’d be
dead and buried
and Uncle Jim
hitched up a team of mules to the wagon
and he cracked the whip over them
10and run them their dead-level best
the whole thirty miles to your great grandma’s funeral
down there in
Green Sea County
and there come up this
15awfulest rainstorm
you ever saw in your whole life
and your grandpa
was setting
in a goat-skin bottomed chair
20and them mules a-running
and him sloshing round in that chairful of water
till he got scalded
he said
and ev-
25ery
anch of skin come off his behind:
we got there just in time to see her buried
in an oak grove up
back of the field:
30it’s growed over with soapbushes and huckleberries now.
1962 (1965)
(as told me by a patient, Ward 3-B,
Veterans Hospital, Fayetteville, August 1962)
I was walking down by the old
Santee
River
one evening, foredark
5fishing I reckon,
when I come on this
swarm of
bees
lit in the fork of a beech limb
10and they werz
jest a swarming:
it was too late to go home
and too far
and brang a bee-gum
15so I waited around
till the sun went
down,
most dark,
and cut me off a pinebough,
20dipped it in the river
and sprankled water
on’em: settled’em right down,
good and solid,
about
25a bushel of
them:
when it got dark I first cut off
the fork branches and
then cut about four foot back toward
30the trunk
and I
throwed the limb over my shoulder and
carried’em home.
1962 (1965)
If you must leave the shores of mind,
scramble down the walls
of dome-locked underwater caves
into the breathless, held
5clarity of dark, where no waves break,
a grainy, colloidal grist
and quiet, carry a light: carry A = πr2,
carry Kepler’s equal areas in
equal times: as air line take Baudelaire’s
10L’Albatros: as depth markers
to call you back, fix the words of
the golden rule: feed the
night of your seeking with clusters
of ancient light:
15remember the sacred sheaf, the rods of
civilization, the holy
bundle of elements: if to cast light
you must enter diffusion’s ruin,
carry with you light to cast, to
20gather darkness by: carry A is to B
as A plus B is to A: if to gather darkness
into light, evil into good,
you must leave the shores of mind,
remember us, return and rediscover us.
1962 (1965)
is a mental object:
is to spirit
a rock of individual shape,
a flowerbed, pylon,
5an arbor vitae
to cerebral loam:
is a moon in the mind,
water and land divided,
a crystal, precipitate,
10separation, refinement,
a victory of being over void,
hazardous commitment,
broken eternity,
limited virtue;
15coming into matter
spirit fallen
trades eternity
for temporal form:
is a symmetry of motion,
20can always find its way
back to oblivion,
must move accommodating,
useful, relevant:
is, dead, a perfection;
25here is its cage
to contemplate; here
time stops
and all its hollow bells
struck loud are
30silenced in the never-ending sound.
1958 (1959)
The stone in my tread
sings by the strip of woods
but is
unheard by open fields:
5surround me then with walls
before I risk
the outer sight, as, walled,
I’ll soon long to.
1963 (1964)
I understand
reading the modern philosophers
that truth is so much a method
it’s perfectly all
5right for me to believe whatever
I like or if I like,
nothing:
I do not know that I care to be set that free:
I am they say
10at liberty to be
provisional, to operate
expediently, do not have to commit myself
to imperturbables, outright
legislations, hardfast rules:
15they say I can
prefer my truths,
whatever
suits my blood,
blends with my proclivities, my temperament:
20I suppose they mean I’ve had more experience than I can
ever read about, taking in
as I do
possibly a hundred sensations per second, conscious
and unconscious,
25and making a vegetal at least
synthesis
from them all, so that
philosophy is
a pry-pole, materialization,
30useful as a snowshovel when it snows;
something solid to knock people down with
or back people up with:
I do not know that I care to be backed up in just that way:
the philosophy gives clubs to
35everyone, and I prefer disarmament:
that is, I would rather relate
to the imperturbable objective
than be the agent of
“possibly unsatisfactory eventualities”:
40isn’t anything plain true:
if I had something
to conform to (without responsibility)
I wouldn’t feel so hot and sticky:
(but I must be moved by what I am moved by):
45they do say, though, I must give some force to facts,
must bend that way enough,
be in on the gist of “concrete observations,”
must be pliant to the drift (roll with the knocks):
they say, too, I must halter my fancy
50mare
with these blinding limitations:
I don’t know that I can go along with that, either:
for though I’ve proved myself stupid by 33 years
of getting nowhere,
55I must nevertheless be given credit for the sense wherewith
I decided never to set out:
what are facts if I can’t line them up
any way I please
and have the freedom
I refused I think in the beginning?
1959 (1963)
are
consecutive:
everything is real: no use
to worry: everything comes after everything,
5safely held in count:
experience, yes:
remember that:
selective memory: but the whole is difficult to
recall, day by day:
10certain things are so clear:
think of the numbers, they proceed: there are five sparrows
at the feeder:
two are on the ground:
one is descending:
15of those three on the ground
one is looking off,
toward or through the hedge, considering:
nevertheless, the count
is perfect:
20942:
do not
worry that anything
is going to go wrong,
please:
25turn to page 5: count two pages farther: count two pages
farther: count two pages farther:
where we are:
there is no use to worry:
grab the addendum:
30today when the leaves fell it was
brilliant: shadows counted every one:
shadows broke against the limbs,
swept with several degrees of intensity across the grass,
moving
35not as
the leaves
moved:
that was exciting:
the angles of descent (tho there is no use to worry) were not
40predictable,
having to do with wind velocities and turns of leaf:
please turn to page 6:
all is explicable:
here are the boxes: 4×4×4×4×4×4×4×4:
45how many? how many?
how many? how many?
many:
the numbers can set you free: square a pear:
pare a pair:
50peel a peer:
a peer? appear
and seem:
be confident;
as you turn the numbers
55veracity
links segment to segment: a sausage bliss!
there is no reason:
for concern:
falls wear the rock away
60by a volume of noise: add it up:
think, think of the numbers, how they move!
appear and seem:
the industrial buildings
are as a shed of apples
65a truck has crushed through: musiked with
bees!
there is no cause:
for concern: spell the numbers: gather them: the numbers
are consecutive:
1964
Prison break!
the single-idea bolt shot back!
the grillwork
of syllogism
5lake loose!
the unyielding walls, square,
sharp-cornered,
fallen flat out
to total openness!
10certain isolations:
the diminished moon over cold
sea:
introduction of rocks
and shrubs—the
15multiform land:
guilt diffused in limitless air:
punishment
glittered dim among turning deep-sea schools:
the unknown—pointless, vacant, blunt:
20emptiness!
say everything again:
say everything over:
cluck the words out of configuration,
into configuration:
25remake:
ramble:
nothing has been established:
the forms have not been placed:
the mixers are not ready:
30the man will hear no answer:
he is not listening:
his heart knows shapeless music:
he is turned loose:
the prison is broken
1964
Evening falls: earth
divides:
insects waken
as
5birds fly to roost:
out there, nothing
happens:
everything is
the
10same.
1963 (1965)
Summer gauds,
crickets
sing:
the cool-snap
5quavers their song
beyond
meanings they intend.
(1964)
summit and blue air
said I am sorry for you
and lifting past
said you
5are mere dust which I
as you see control
yet nevertheless are
instrument of miracle
and rose
10out of earshot but
returning in a slow loop
said while
I am always just this bunch of
compensating laws
15pushed, pushing
not air or motion
but the motion of air
I coughed
and the wind said
20Ezra will live
to see your last
sun come up again
I turned (as I will) to weeds and
the wind went off
25carving
monuments through a field of stone
monuments whose shape
wind cannot arrest but
taking hold on
30changes
while Ezra
listens from terraces of mind
wind cannot reach or
weedroots of my low-feeding shiver
1958 (1959)
Coming to a pinywoods
where a stream darted across the path
like a squirrel or frightened blacksnake
I sat down on a sunny hillock
5and leaned back against a pine
and picked up some dry pineneedle bundles from the ground
and tore each bundle apart a needle at a time
It was not Coulter’s pine
for coulteri is funnier looking
10and not Monterey either
and I thought God must have had Linnaeus in mind
orders of trees correspond so well between them
and I dropped to sleep wondering what design God
had meant the human mind to fit
15and looked up and saw a great bird
warming in the sun high on a pine limb
tearing from his breast golden feathers
softer than new gold that
dropped to the wind one or two
20gently and touched my face
I picked one up and it said
The world is bright after rain
for rain washes death out of the land and hides it far
beneath the soil and it returns again cleansed with life
25and so all is a circle
and nothing is separable
Look at this noble pine from which you are
almost indistinguishable it is also sensible
and cries out when it is felled
30and so I said are trees blind and is the earth black to them
Oh if trees are blind
I do not want to be a tree
A wind rising of one in time blowing the feather away
forsaken I woke
35and the golden bird had flown away and the sun
had moved the shadows over me so I rose and walked on
(1957)
West light flat on trees:
bird flying
deep out in blue glass:
uncertain wind
5stirring the leaves: this is
the world we have:
take it
1963 (1965)