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“Now, tell me one difference,” my sister says, “between Old English and New English.” Well, Old English has a word for our kind of people:ofermod, literally “overmind,” or “overheart,” or “overspirit,” often translated “overproud.” When the warrior Byrhtnoth, overfool, invited the Vikings across the ford at Maldon to fight his smaller troop at closer range, his overpride proved deadlier than the gold-hilted and file-hard swords the poet gleefully describes — and aren’t we like that, high-strung and ofermod as our daddy and granddaddies and everybody else in our stiff-necked mountain town, always with something stupid to prove, doing 80 all the way to the head of the holler, weaving through the double lines; splinting a door-slammed finger with popsicle sticks and electrical tape; not filling out the forms for food stamps though we know we qualify. Sister, I’ve seen you cuss rivals, teachers, doctors, bill collectors, lawyers, cousins, strangers at the red light or the Walmart; you start it, you finish it, you everything-in-between-it, whether it’s with your fists, or a two-by-four, or a car door, and it doesn’t matter that your foe’s stronger, taller, better armed. I don’t tell a soul when I’m down to flour and tuna and a half-bag of beans, so you’ve not seen me do without just to do without, just for spite at them who told us, “It’s a sin to be beholden.” If you’re Byrhtnoth lying gutted on the ground, speechifying at the troops he’s doomed, then I’m the idiot campaigner fighting beside his hacked-up lord instead of turning tail, insisting, “Mind must be the harder, heart the keener, spirit the greater, as our strength lessens.” Now, don’t that sound familiar? We’ve bought it all our lives as it’s been sold by drunkards, bruisers, goaders, soldiers, braggers with a single code: you might be undermined, girl, but don’t you never be undermod.

Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere, an early autumn stillness in the air, the kind of empty day you fill by taking in the full size of the valley and its layers leading slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country, if you stand here long enough, you could stay for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall, pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall meadow, high above the harvest, perfect to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent sunlit smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains, though you could walk until it’s dark and not reach those rains— you could walk the rest of the day into the picture and not know why, at any given moment, you’re there.

She tells him she's leaving him and he bakes a pie. His pies are exquisite, their crusts like crinoline. He doesn't change clothes, works in slacks, shirtsleeves rolled. Summer makes the kitchen unbearable but he suffers beautifully, tenderly cuts the strawberries, pours into the deep curve of the bowl. She hadn't missed his hands since last they drew her to his body. Now she watches them stroke the edges of the dough, shape it like cooling glass. When the oven opens, his brow drips, he brings his hands to his face.

When a creature dies ... the flesh and soft parts of the body rot quickly. All that is left are the bones and teeth. (textbook entry on ‘fossils’) Sometimes. You, mother, dying, left what was hard first: bones weeping into your veins like flutes, teeth vanished on some hospital lunch tray. In your last mute days you parted with one more hard thing: the gold ring I was to save for my child. As your hand offered that bright circle (only seen as a whole now, when empty) did your thoughts reach, like mine, for your first wedding ring? You took that one off when I was seven or eight and sent it spinning from a car window. I can still feel the wet blades of grass slipping through my fingers, night dew coming on, you and father loud in the parked car. I searched there as if life spilled from a ring that lay somewhere out of sight but within reach, hid where only the crickets knew. I took the scraping of their mating calls for crying, as if they shared loss—my childish heart consoled by a soft ‘as if.’ The consolation carries on: their song (light as air, softer than voices) plays through my thoughts about that evening and fills the lost ring’s hollow with life’s most lasting part, cries for new love.

The work has been going forward with the greatest difficulty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more difficult than it has ever been before. – From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome. Hardly enough for me that the pail of water Alive with the wrinkling light Brings clearness home and whiter Than mind conceives the walls mature to white, Or that the washed tomatoes whose name is given To love fulfill their bowl And the Roman sea is woven Together by threading fish and made most whole. I delight in each of these, delight moreover In the dark skill of those hands Closer to wise than clever Of our blind Italian landlady who stands Her shoes fouled with the lustful blood of rabbit Lightly dispatched and dressed Fixing it to the gibbet Of the clothesline where the laundry sails to rest. These textures solicit of us our instant homage But are disparate senseless things Unless a reigning image Bring them to purpose as your presence brings The world in offering, like a chaplet worn In Aphrodite’s name, The furious unicorn Come to the virgin’s lap tethered and tame. And thus it is as you stand in this morning’s shadows Where ancient chamber pots Are grown to little meadows Of mint and parsley; surely it’s love unknots The winds for Ulysses and recalls to man A summer without cease; Sprung from the same dishpan Onion and lily work their primal peace.

Wounded Knee Years since I’d been back to the memorial; I’d forgotten it was up on a rise above the killing ground. Two kids appeared in the dust with things to sell—once coming from the far end of the chain-link, two kinds of dream-catchers hanging from his arm; and the girl, hunched on the broken steps under the arch’s improbable cross, cradling a Tupperware bowl of beaded star-necklaces in her lap. Her pink- and-silver t-shirt read PRINCESS. I shut my car door, and a grouse startled off the fence, veered away over bent switchgrass. The girl— Allie—said her little sisters made the jewelry, in the gray house at the base of the hill; maybe her price included the pictures I walked behind her to take: the marker for 1890, then the more recent graves, in ground seared and hardpanned by wind and snow and desolation; tied, bandana-pouches of tobacco, and ribbons, like fists and fingers shifting and fluttering; a few tough bright flowers left; gray-blue sky rolling above to the edges of horizon all around, spitting, cooking up a storm. I stood and turned back toward the arch again, where Allie and her friend, if he was a friend, hadn’t spoken a word to one another. For the first time in my life I wished I’d had some cigarettes— to smoke with them, at least offer, something to do with strangers you might sit a while beside till maybe one of you thought of something to say. A little thunder crackled, and we said goodbye; I drove on toward the shaft of rain above Manderson.  No reason to think I’d be any memory to them; a dream- catcher sold, a brilliant blue necklace. I passed a knocked-over vote Democrat sign, and two younger kids working on a bike upside-down, and remembered the small bowls, empty now, brought and offered at the graves surrounded for miles by graves never found. Rain would fill them, lift the reservoirs, clear the air. I thought of reaching over to pop the camera-back open; turned from dirt onto narrow blacktop, the road out, that was steaming.

Oft, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood’s years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone, Now dimm’d and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me. When I remember all The friends, so link’d together, I’ve seen around me fall, Like leaves in wintry weather; I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded. It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun’s going down whose secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.

Often I imagine the earth through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of— atoms, peculiar atoms everywhere— no me, no you, no opinions, no beginning, no middle, no end, soaring together like those ancient Chinese birds hatched miraculously with only one wing, helping each other fly home.

Often rebuked, yet always back returning To those first feelings that were born with me, And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning For idle dreams of things which cannot be: To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region; Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; And visions rising, legion after legion, Bring the unreal world too strangely near. I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces, And not in paths of high morality, And not among the half-distinguished faces, The clouded forms of long-past history. I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide: Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding; Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side. What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? More glory and more grief than I can tell: The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.