into the blood. Man’s will,

long schooled to kill or have

its way, would drive the beast

against nature, transcend

the impossible in simple fury.

The blow falls like a dead seed.

It is defeat, for beasts

do not pardon, but heal or die

in the absence of the past.

The blow survives in the man.

His triumph is a wound. Spent,

he must wait the slow

unalterable forgiveness of time.

Planting Crocuses

1.

I made an opening

to reach through blind

into time, through

sleep and silence, to new

heat, a new rising,

a yellow flower opening

in the sound of bees.

2.

Deathly was the giving

of that possibility

to a motion of the world

that would bring it

out, bright, in time.

My mind pressing in

3.

through the earth’s

dark motion toward

bloom, I thought of you,

glad there is no escape.

It is this we will be

turning and re-

turning to.

Poem for J.

What she has made in her body is broken.

Now she has begun to bear it again.

In the house of her son’s death

his life is shining in the windows,

for she has elected to bear him again.

She did not bear him for death,

and she does not. She has taken back

into her body the seed, bitter

and joyous, of the life of a man.

In the house of the dead the windows shine

with life. She mourns, for his life was good.

She is not afraid. She is like a field

where the corn is planted, and like the rain

that waters the field, and like the young corn.

In her sorrow she renews life, in her grief

she prepares the return of joy.

She did not bear him for death, and she does not.

There was a life that went out of her to live

on its own, divided, and now she has taken it back.

She is alight with the sudden new life of death.

Perhaps it is the brightness of the dead one

being born again. Perhaps she is planting him,

like corn, in the living and in the earth.

She has taken back into her flesh,

and made light, the dark seed of her pain.

CLEARING

History

For Wallace Stegner

1.

The crops were made, the leaves

were down, three frosts had lain

upon the broad stone

step beneath the door;

as I walked away

the houses were shut, quiet

under their drifting smokes,

the women stooped at the hearths.

Beyond the farthest tracks

of any domestic beast

my way led me, into

a place for which I knew

no names. I went by paths

that bespoke intelligence

and memory I did not know.

Noonday held sounds of moving

water, moving air, enormous

stillness of old trees.

Though I was weary and alone,

song was near me then,

wordless and gay as a deer

lightly stepping. Learning

the landmarks and the ways

of that land, so I might