He stood on the ground
and saw his wife borne away
in the air, and suddenly
knew her. It is not the sky
he trusts her to, or her flight,
but to herself as he saw her
turn back and smile. And he
turned back to the buried garden
where the spring flood rose.
The window is made strange
by these days he has come to.
She is the comfort of the rooms
she leaves behind her.

24.

His love returns
and walks among the trees,
a new time lying beneath
the leaves at her feet.
There are songs in the ground
audible to her. She enters
the dark globe of sleep,
waking the tree frogs
whose songs star the silence
in constellations. She wakens
the birds of mornings. The sun
makes a low gentle piping.
The bloodroot rises in its folded
leaf, and there is a tensing
in the woods. There is
no window where she is.
All is clear where the light begins
to dress the branch in green.

25.

The bloodroot is white
in the woods, and men renew
their abuse of the world
and each other. Abroad
we burn and maim
in the name of principles
we no longer recognize in acts.
At home our flayed land
flows endlessly
to burial in the sea.
When mortality is not heavy
on us, humanity is—
public meaninglessness
preying on private meaning.
As the weather warms, the driven
swarm into the river,
pursued by whining engines,
missing the world
as they pass over it,
every man
his own mosquito.

26.

In the heron’s eye
is one of the dies of change.
Another
is in the sun.
Each thing is carried
beyond itself.
The man of the window
lives at the edge,
knowing the approach
of what must be, joy
and dread.
Now the old sycamore
yields at its crown
a dead branch.
It will sink like evening
into its standing place.
The young trees rise,
and the dew is on them,
and the heat of the day
is on them, and the dark
—end and beginning
without end.

27.

Now that April with sweet rain
has come to Port Royal again,
Burley Coulter rows out
on the river to fish.
He sits all day in his boat,
tied to a willow, his hat
among green branches,
his dark line curving
in the wind. He is one
with the sun.
The current’s horses graze
in the shade along the banks.
The watcher leaves his window
and goes out.
He sits in the woods, watched
by more than he sees.
What is his is
past. He has come
to a roofless place
and a windowless.
There is a wild light
his mind loses
until the spring renews,
but it holds his mind
and will not let it rest.
The window is a fragment
of the world suspended
in the world, the known
adrift in mystery.
And now the green rises.
The window has an edge
that is celestial,
where the eyes are surpassed.

About this Book

This book was originally designed, composed, and printed on a Washington handpress by Bob Baris at his Press on Scroll Road. The type is handset Cloister Lightface. Wesley Bates did the wood engravings.