from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

history’s death upon the place and the trees that would

have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Winter Night Poem for Mary

As I started home after dark

I looked into the sky and saw the new moon,

an old man with a basket on his arm.

He walked among the cedars in the bare woods.

They stood like guardians, dark

as he passed. He might have been singing,

or he might not. He might have been sowing

the spring flowers, or he might not. But I saw him

with his basket, going along the hilltop.

Winter Nightfall

The fowls speak and sing, settling for the night.

The mare shifts in the bedding.

In her womb her foal sleeps and grows,

within and within and within. Her jaw grinds,

meditative in the fragrance of timothy.

Soon now my own rest will come.

The silent river flows on in the dusk, miles and miles.

Outside, the walls and on the roof and in the woods

the cold rain falls.

February 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and of various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling

into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

and one lives at the expense of life.

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth. And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

A Wet Time

The land is an ark, full of things waiting.

Underfoot it goes temporary and soft, tracks

filling with water as the foot is raised.