The fields, sodden, go free of plans. Hands

become obscure in their use, prehistoric.

The mind passes over changed surfaces

like a boat, drawn to the thought of roofs

and to the thought of swimming and wading birds.

Along the river croplands and gardens

are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark

and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch

holding the new nest of the hummingbird

the river flows heavy with earth, the water

turned the color of broken slopes. I stand

deep in the mud of the shore, a stake

planted to measure the rise, the water rising,

the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood

passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots

drag the bottom. I was not ready for this

parting, my native land putting out to sea.

On the Hill Late at Night

The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight

in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness

of the grass, fathomless, the long blades

rising out of the well of time. Cars

travel the valley roads below me, their lights

finding the dark, and racing on. Above

their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard,

and felt the country turn under the stars

toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here

between the bright silent thousands of stars

and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.

The hill has grown to me like a foot.

Until I lift the earth I cannot move.

A Standing Ground

Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;
Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal …

However just and anxious I have been,

I will stop and step back

from the crowd of those who may agree

with what I say, and be apart.

There is no earthly promise of life or peace

but where the roots branch and weave

their patient silent passages in the dark;

uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.

I am not bound for any public place,

but for ground of my own

where I have planted vines and orchard trees,

and in the heat of the day climbed up

into the healing shadow of the woods.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn

and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my

inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission

to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so bet it.

I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,

and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,

and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,

in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught

so often laughing at funerals, that was because

I knew the dead were already slipping away,

preparing a comeback, and can I help it?

And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed