in rows, and in the rounds

of years. His journey’s end

is no place of ease, but the farm

itself, the place day labor

starts from, journeys in,

returns to: the fields

whose past and potency are one.

4.

And that is our story,

not of time, but the forever

returning events of light,

ancient knowledge seeking

new minds. The man at dawn

in spring of the year,

going to the fields,

visionary of seed and desire,

is timeless as a star.

5.

Any man’s death could end the story:

his mourners, having accompanied him

to the grave through all he knew,

turn back, leaving him complete.

But this is not the story of a life.

It is the story of lives, knit together,

overlapping in succession, rising

again from grave after grave.

For those who depart from it, bearing it

in their minds, the grave is a beginning.

It has weighted the earth with sudden

new gravity, the enrichment of pain.

There is a grave, too, in each

survivor. By it, the dead one lives.

He enters us, a broken blade,

sharp, clear as a lens or a mirror.

And he comes into us helpless, tender

as the newborn enter the world. Great

is the burden of our care. We must be true

to ourselves. How else will he know us?

Like a wound, grief receives him.

Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep

as part of ourselves the severe gift.

By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligence of life.

Where the tree falls the forest rises.

There is nowhere to stand but in absence,

no life but in the fateful light.

6.

Ended, a story is history;

it is in time, with time

lost. But if a man’s life

continues in another man,

then the flesh will rhyme

its part in immortal song.

By absence, he comes again.

There is a kinship of the fields

that gives to the living the breath

of the dead. The earth

opened in the spring, opens

in all springs. Nameless,

ancient, many-lived, we reach

through ages with the seed.

Song

I stood and heard the steps of the city

and dreamed a lighter stepping than I heard,

the tread of my people dancing in a ring.

I knew that circle broken, the steps awry,

stone and iron humming in the air.

But I thought even there, among the straying

steps, of the dance that circles life around,

its shadows moving on the ground, in rhyme

of flesh with flesh, time with time, our bliss,

the earthly song that heavenly is.

Our Children, Coming of Age

In the great circle, dancing in

and out of time, you move now

toward your partners, answering

the music suddenly audible to you

that only carried you before

and will carry you again.

When you meet the destined ones

now dancing toward you,

we will be in line behind you,

out of your awareness for the time,