we whom you know, others we remember

whom you do not remember, others

forgotten by us all.

When you meet, and hold love

in your arms, regardless of all,

the unknown will dance away from you

toward the horizon of light.

Our names will flutter

on these hills like little fires.

ENTRIES

The Record

My old friend tells us how the country changed:

where the grist mill was on Cane Run,

now gone; where the peach orchard was,

gone too; where the Springport Road was, gone

beneath returning trees; how the creek ran three weeks

after a good rain, long ago, no more;

how when these hillsides first were plowed, the soil

was black and deep, no stones, and that was long ago;

where the wild turkeys roosted in the old days;

‘You’d have to know this country mighty well

before I could tell you where.’

And my young friend says: ‘Have him speak this

into a recorder. It is precious. It should be saved.’

I know the panic of that wish to save

the vital knowledge of the old times, handed down,

for it is rising off the earth, fraying away

in the wind and the coming day.

As the machines come and the people go

the old names rise, chattering, and depart.

But knowledge of my own going into old time

tells me no. Because it must be saved,

do not tell it to a machine to save it.

That old man speaking you have heard

since your boyhood, since his prime, his voice

speaking out of lives long dead, their minds

speaking in his own, by winter fires, in fields and woods,

in barns while rain beat on the roofs

and wind shook the girders. Stay and listen

until he dies or you die, for death

is in this, and grief is in it. Live here

as one who knows those things. Stay, if you live;

listen and answer. Listen to the next one

like him, if there is to be one. Be

the next one like him, if you must;

say and wait. Tell your children. Tell them

to tell their children. As you depart

toward the coming light, turn back

and speak, as the creek steps downward

over the rocks, saying the same changing thing

in the same place as it goes.

When the record is made, the unchanging

word carried to a safe place

in a time not here, the assemblage

of minds dead and living, the loved lineage

dispersed, silent, turned away, the dead

dead at last, it will be too late.

A Parting

From many hard workdays in the fields,

many passages through the woods,

many mornings on the river, lifting

hooked lines out of the dark,

from many nightfalls, many dawns,

on the ridgetops and the creek road,

as upright as a tree, as freely standing,

Arthur Rowanberry comes in his old age

into the care of doctors, into the prison

of technical mercy, disease