The summer ends, and it is time

To face another way. Our theme

Reversed, we harvest the last row

To store against the cold, undo

The garden that will be undone.

We grieve under the weakened sun

To see all earth’s green fountains dried,

And fallen all the works of light.

You do not speak, and I regret

This downfall of the good we sought

As though the fault were mine. I bring

The plow to turn the shattering

Leaves and bent stems into the dark,

From which they may return. At work,

I see you leaving our bright land,

The last cut flowers in your hand.

VII.

Coming to the woods’ edge

on my Sunday morning walk,

I stand resting a moment beside

a ragged half-dead wild plum

in bloom, its perfume

a moment enclosing me,

and standing side by side

with the old broken blooming tree,

I almost understand,

I almost recognize as a friend

the great impertinence of beauty

that comes even to the dying,

even to the falling, without reason

sweetening the air.

I walk on,

Distracted by a letter accusing me

of distraction, which distracts me

only from the hundred things

that would otherwise distract me

from this whiteness, lightness,

sweetness in the air. The mind

is broken by the thousand

calling voices it is always too late

to answer, and that is why it yearns

for some hard task, lifelong, longer

than life, to concentrate it

and make it whole.

But where is the all-welcoming,

all-consecrating Sabbath

that would do the same? Where

the quietness of the heart

and the eye’s clarity

that would be a friend’s reply

to the white-blossoming plum tree?

VIII.

Always in the distance

the sound of cars is passing

on the road, that simplest form

going only two ways,

both ways away. And I

have been there in that going.

But now I rest and am

apart, a part of the form

of the woods always arriving

from all directions home,

this cell of wild sound,

the hush of the trees, singers

hidden among the leaves –

a form whose history is old,

needful, unknown, and bright

as the history of the stars

that tremble in the sky at night

like leaves of a great tree.

IX.

In the early morning we awaken from

The sound of engines running in the night,

And then we start the engines of the day.

We speed away into the fading light.

Nowhere is any sound but of our going

On roads strung everywhere with humming wire.

Nowhere is there an end except in smoke.

This is the world that we have set on fire.

This is the promised burning, darkening

Our light of hope and putting out the sun,

Blighting the leaf, the stream – and blessed area

The dead who died before this time began.

Blessed the dead who have escaped in time

The twisted metal and the fractured stone,

The technobodies of the hopeless cure.