their crimson bright, then

dark as they move into

and then against the light.

May the year warm them

soon. May they soon go

north with their singing

and the season follow.

May the bare sticks soon

live, and our minds go free

of the ground

into the shining of trees.

The Porch Over the River

In the dusk of the river, the wind

gone, the trees grow still –

the beautiful poise of lightness,

the heavy world pushing toward it.

Beyond, on the face of the water,

lies the reflection of another tree,

inverted, pulsing with the short strokes

of waves the wind has stopped driving.

In a time when men no longer

can imagine the lives of their sons

this is still the world –

the world of my time, the grind

of engines marking the country

like an audible map, the high dark

marked by the flight of men,

lights stranger than stars.

The phoebes cross and re-cross

the openings, alert

for what may still be earned

from the light. The whippoorwills

begin, and the frogs. And the dark

falls again, as it must.

The look of the world withdraws

into the vein of memory.

The mirrored tree, darkening, stirs

with the water’s inward life. What has

made it so? – a quietness in it

no question can be asked in.

The Sycamore

for Henry Caudill

In the place that is my own place, whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in

that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

The Dream

I dream an inescapable dream

in which I take away from the country

the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,

ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,

our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

I restore then the wide-branching trees.

I see growing over the land and shading it

the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.