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“Oh! for a thousand tongues to sing My great Redeemer’s praise: The glories of my Lord and King, The triumphs of His grace.” Oh! for a thousand cedar posts To fence my garden ’round. To hinder the neighbors’ pigs and goats From rooting up my potato ground. Oh! for a thousand hickory rails, To make my fence secure; A thousand patent locks and keys, To lock my stable door. Oh! for a thousand bricks and stones, To build my chimney higher, To keep the neighbors’ boys and girls From putting out my fire. Oh! for a thousand old shot guns, That I might be a match, For all the tramps that I can find In my watermelon patch. Oh! for a thousand pumpkin seeds, To plant for my son John; He says that pumpkin pies are good When the winter time comes on. Oh! for a thousand cribs of corn, Filled chuck up to the beam; And a thousand pails that’s good and strong, To keep the milk and cream. Oh! for a thousand turnip bads, Placed all into a row; Lord! please send a little rain, To make the ’tatoes grow. Oh! for a thousand tongues to ask My maker, who’s on high, To keep my smoke-house filled with meal, Fat bacon, rock and rye. Now, Lord, I close my humble prayer, Which (to some) may seem a vision; Numbers ask for all I’ve named, Whilst few ask for RELIGION.

Each day I go into the fields to see what is growing and what remains to be done. It is always the same thing: nothing is growing, everything needs to be done. Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray till my bones ache and hands rub blood-raw with honest labor— all that grows is the slow intransigent intensity of need. I have sown my seed on soil guaranteed by poverty to fail. But I don’t complain—except to passersby who ask me why I work such barren earth. They would not understand me if I stooped to lift a rock and hold it like a child, or laughed, or told them it is their poverty I labor to relieve. For them, I complain. A farmer of dreams knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams knows what it means to be patient. Each day I go into the fields.

"Farming Family, 1912," by August Sander The cruelty of the men when they’re alone, The women’s tiredness and resignation, Do not get multiplied, as you’d expect, When the extended families collect, One day a year, to get their pictures taken. It’s not that any of their faces soften, Nor that there’s any obvious affection Between the farmer’s mother and his son; And only an idealist could see In this brief cutting from the family tree A symbol of the strength of rootedness— Three generations dwelling in one place— Knowing how soon the root will lose its branch, Cut down and hacked to pieces in a trench. The only explanation that makes sense For the illusion of resilience That lights their eyes and makes them look at home Is that with every added generation Buried potentialities appear: The son who poses strumming his guitar Refutes his father’s brandished Iron Cross No more convincingly than his bare face Proves that his father’s beard is obsolete; Denying one another, they complete Their likeness to the contradictory God who commanded us to multiply So He could manifest, in every birth, Another of His attributes on earth.

The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men. I swear before the dawn comes round again I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

for Richard Before the days of self service, when you never had to pump your own gas, I was the one who did it for you, the girl who stepped out at the sound of a bell with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back in a straight, unlovely ponytail. This was before automatic shut-offs and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank, I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas backed up, came arcing out of the hole in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts, belly and legs. And I had to hurry back to the booth, the small employee bathroom with the broken lock, to change my uniform, peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin and wash myself in the sink. Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt pure and amazed — the way the amber gas glazed my flesh, the searing, subterranean pain of it, how my skin shimmered and ached, glowed like rainbowed oil on the pavement. I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall, for the first time, in love, that man waiting patiently in my future like a red leaf on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty that asks to be noticed. How was I to know it would begin this way: every cell of my body burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me a nimbus of light that would carry me through the days, how when he found me, weeks later, he would find me like that, an ordinary woman who could rise in flame, all he would have to do is come close and touch me.

The drum says that the night we die will be a long night. It says the children have time to play. Tell the grownups They can pull the curtains around the bed tonight. The old man wants to know how the war ended. The young girl wants her breasts to cause the sun to rise. The thinker wants to keep misunderstanding alive. It’s all right if the earthly monk is buried near the altar. It’s all right if the singer fails to turn up for her concert. It’s good if the fat old couple keeps whirling around. Let the parents sing over the cradle every night. Let the pelicans go on living in their stickly nests. Let the duck go on loving the mud around her feet. It’s all right if the ant always remembers his way home. It’s all right if Bach keeps reaching for the same note. It’s all right if we knock the ladder away from the house. Even if you are a puritan it would be all right If you join the lovers in their ruined house tonight. It’s good if you become a soul and then disappear.

(FROM THE NORSE TONGUE) Now the storm begins to lower, (Haste, the loom of Hell prepare.) Iron-sleet of arrowy shower Hurtles in the darken'd air. Glitt'ring lances are the loom, Where the dusky warp we strain, Weaving many a soldier's doom, Orkney's woe, and Randver's bane. See the grisly texture grow, ('Tis of human entrails made,) And the weights, that play below, Each a gasping warrior's head. Shafts for shuttles, dipt in gore, Shoot the trembling cords along. Sword, that once a monarch bore, Keep the tissue close and strong. Mista black, terrific maid, Sangrida, and Hilda see, Join the wayward work to aid: Tis the woof of victory. Ere the ruddy sun be set, Pikes must shiver, javelins sing, Blade with clatt'ring buckler meet, Hauberk crash, and helmet ring. (Weave the crimson web of war) Let us go, and let us fly, Where our friends the conflict share, Where they triumph, where they die. As the paths of fate we tread, Wading thro' th' ensanguin'd field: Gondula, and Geira, spread O'er the youthful king your shield. We the reins to slaughter give, Ours to kill, and ours to spare: Spite of danger he shall live. (Weave the crimson web of war.) They, whom once the desert-beach Pent within its bleak domain, Soon their ample sway shall stretch O'er the plenty of the plain. Low the dauntless earl is laid Gor'd with many a gaping wound: Fate demands a nobler head; Soon a king shall bite the ground. Long his loss shall Erin weep, Ne'er again his likeness see; Long her strains in sorrow steep, Strains of immortality. Horror covers all the heath, Clouds of carnage blot the sun. Sisters, weave the web of death; Sisters, cease, the work is done. Hail the task, and hail the hands! Songs of joy and triumph sing! Joy to the victorious bands; Triumph to the younger king. Mortal, thou that hear'st the tale, Learn the tenor of our song. Scotland thro' each winding vale Far and wide the notes prolong. Sisters, hence with spurs of speed: Each her thund'ring falchion wield; Each bestride her sable steed. Hurry, hurry to the field.

Come October, it’s the lake not the border that has been redrawn. Thinking about the event afterwards, I realize how remarkably well-prepared the girls are. There don’t seem to be any slouches among them. Please tell them I say hello and that we’ll need 14 for the green salad and 14 for the apple tarts between with some rapid washing in clear water I remember as play and planning in childhood, preparing until the very last moment for a gripping narrative that was itself perpetually given over to improvisations and asymmetrical collaborations that could run for days. That makes another 14. It was ”the word“ or “the world” in 1981 when we undertook to talk about the phrase “once in a while” once in a while noting the vagueness then named “a while” and how “once” the phrase recurs and therefore means more than once the “while” is defined. We too are in “a while” and when “once” next occurs, if the basic design suits you, we will need a bit of modestly biographical contextualization for November. I’m going to put some thought to something implausibly contemporary which perhaps isn’t wise since between then and now no new coincidences have been noted just one large color photograph of bespangled cowgirls herding heavy bulls up the avenue that opens this week carefully wearing baby blue boots to take out the garbage but it never rained. At the end of the month, Halloween should be clear.

Home whose names are produced by motion is where people go (one following the next as she hums to herself or he hums to himself at some risk to all) to stay in a family plot the tales of which are spinning like blades on a pinwheel wafted by my desire to talk to you. Fate and desire, chance and intention, from time to time converge. Most people want things to be good but taking a programmatic approach to getting it would be despicable and none of it would ever get to you except via a raucous garage sale. The owner of the pharmacy at this very moment is screaming in jubilation at a silver toaster, I want it even if it doesn’t work! Two firemen have broken down mid-sentence and gone out to look, you know the ones. The purport comes all at once at the end in such a way that one is thrown back to the poem again to carry out the ”again“ that the poem is about. I’ll get a library card at last and I won’t pay $100 for it feeling tired but only as tired as one would normally feel at sea level after, say, a five hour hike, and it was the same when it was just getting light—a murky gray that never brightened. I don’t know you well enough to break away from my conversations in order to barge in on yours and give the illusion that I often know where I’m going or where I want to go with certainty of motive to propel the prose or some version of certainty of my own, not knowing where one is going but going anyway. Perhaps the trip will be purposeless. Destiny is simply a good excuse for experience. There are birds chirping, smoke is rising from kerosene-splattered barbecue briquettes, it is summer and now, humiliated (I am so damned naive sometimes), swinging the hips to the right to avoid the edge of the worktable, then to the left to avoid toppling the cactus I shout, “Things! Things! Get out of my way!” I’ve never lost my capacity for being angry. I feel that it is justified, even necessary, though I admit that after the first hour my improvisations contribute nothing but motion to the composition.

The best words get said frequently—they are like fertile pips. Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life to think about. Take R—the only thing R could credit herself with was having lived her life and so she not only kept an account of it but did so not in the privacy of a diary but in the form of letters —abundant, profligate, indiscrete—that I want to write to you so as to note something that I read this morning: “It’s not that this or that means something to me but this!—or that!— means something to me.” Musically R bequeaths herself to posterity as a scholar might bequeath his or her library blowing twisted veils of rain past the narrow and curving windows in the last hour that will carry us along to the time when those who come after us will learn what we know—a man with a mustache waxed and dyed green, a line of tall people and a woman at the door, a committee of children without scooters but not mournful, a poet with a motive, a pilot with a flashlight, a sulking but fascinated scholar, and Goethe no doubt for whom R would have released a flock of red canaries.