Cherry Valley Summer

Prince Edward county summer

Small boys roam the fields of hay

My days full of ease and wonder

Old farmers smiling as we play.

Every split rail fence a border

Every field an undiscovered land

A hickory tree a ship beneath my orders

Chasing pirates was my Queen's command.

Out Among the Raspberries

A poet crowding forty muses on old age

But this one does not worry his aging loves,

His grandfather's image in the garden rows

Speaks the peace of the advancing years,

Each passing sun was but a step to final rest

Old slouch hat and holey sweater,

Gumboots and hands wrinkles

And always a voice leveled against tomfoolery.

He went so quietly into that good night

He talked to me, in peace, before he went.

Towards a Permanent Hold on the Resurrection or: Inverse/Adverse April May 1977

All poets die.

You'd better know this

As you, if you, search their ways;

Their labyrinthine passages

Might not seem worthwhile for following

Into darkness you would rather doubt

And death.

All poets die,

If they're real, I mean, of course.

There is a kind of verse

- Fifty cents a card, in the drugstore -

Written by someone who never was alive.

But that's not poetry,

And what was not alive can never die.

Real poetry is death.

Sister, angel, brother

Death:

To all ambition

To all haste

To all error

To all waste

To all but All and Nothing,

Death.

An every day funeral

Of something in the heart / Of something in the eyes

That blinds the eyes / That blinds the heart

And you can bet your sweet oblivion,

And all the ways you have of getting it,

That poetry will kill that too.

Eve, you know, sprung out

From Adam's ribs,

Is just the symbol;

The poet comes bone grey

From the ribs collapsed on Calvary

Do not come to poetry for comfort.

All poets die;

Do not come to poetry for ecstasy.

Do not rob the rights of fishing streams,

Or baseball fields,

Or churches still as stone.

Don't banquet, damn you,

Where dry bread and lashes

Leaping in the night

Might help you in your blindness

Find the missing dawn.

All poets die,

Especially on the eve of discovery,

Assassinated by the grim realization

That nothing, especially their intuitions,

Is really new.

If the poet finds anything new

He has to throw it away,

Because of all old things

Poetry is oldest.

Whatever is new, therefore, and so on,

Is not in any way poetry.

It might be physics, or even psychology,

But it is not poetry.

All poets die,

And kiss the grave that swallows them.

Oh lovely grave, oh welcome earth

Wherein the poet, discovering the point of worms

Knows a needed rest from men.

All poets die.

Their bodies sink like water to the rock.

Their bodies flow like rivers to the sea.

Their minds dissolve and all their words

Are honoured, like the fish they might have been,

Had God not ordered otherwise.

All poets die:

That is the lesson.

Poetry is death.

Poetry is death.

Poetry is death.

Death is poetry.

For Teresa Stratas

I have not been more glad of writing

Then in watching you

Pouring out Salome's wrath

And heartbreak: it is true

You reached such scalding depths of sorrow

And heights of passion's pain

The devil ran hard from my daughters

And fears to lurk again.

For you unmasked his coiling evils

With your mirror and masque,

More perfect image of his poison,

No one sane could ask.

Such a marvel was your making

That image by my pen,

Though I in justice must be writing

Yet is effort in vain.

But still as artist knowing fear

To climb perfection's height

I think that next time you could use

The honour that I write.

And so I stumble here to find

Some tribute fit to measure

That could touch you in your trials

To find again your treasure.

To rise again such creation

Must prove you twice a star

I am grateful, if I help

To tell you what you are.

In a Library (For my favourite editor)

Opening Bliss Carmen at random

And seeing some silly couplets

I felt the shame of bad poetry

From a good imagination

Which is mainly the effect of

Not waiting for the silences

That worked before.

That was yesterday, in a moment's

Moment

As I already held some Greeks

And other classics in my arms

And was being asked advice

But I got the message,

It was: mutter not at being made to wait.

Today, from perhaps recollecting

Hemingway's promise that the candlelight

Was worth the wait

I took some further time,

A memory's many moments

To remember how you taught me

To spot the artist over eager

To disturb his own peace and mine

For cheap production.

I swallowed gall, of course.

And you were either brave or innocent,

Or strangely both but in the end

It seasons out to honey.

Gratitude, good lady, moves my pen;

And caution, for I will be galled again

But better pain to share between us two

Than a fool's long pleasures for all the world to view.

The Miner

How much longer must I go on searching

How many books do I have to probe

How many shelves do I have to dig through

Before I find my mother lode?

I've been flown into the north country

I've worked the hill creeks of the south

I've looked around the east and west

And even tried the wise man's mouth.

I'm not an ordinary miner,

Though sometimes I wish I were

For looking out for the philosopher's stone

Is not so easy to prefer.

Light In August

Faulkner, take me to your country

Your roads somehow are also mine

Let us discourse in your backwoods

Puzzling through our break with time.

Somehow you and I together

Both found logs a throne for rest,

Heard the singing in the forest

Of the angels make us blest,

Laid our guns aside for psalters,

Though the guns would roar again

And found the way that closed eyes hunted

Was a wise way for men.

My songs need your baton for singing

I have to hear your lyric hand,

Should my listeners hear my message

Yours the honour we command.