Galway Kinnell

1 The old watch: their thick eyes puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads trailed by the beginnings of necks, shiver, in the guarantee they shall be bodies. In the frog pond the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps, I hear its drone, drifting, high up in immaculate ozone. 2 And I hear, coming over the hills, America singing, her varied carols I hear: crack of deputies' rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night, sput of cattleprod, TV going on about the smells of the human body, curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs the rice of the world, with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses. 3 And by paddies in Asia bones wearing a few shadows walk down a dirt road, smashed bloodsuckers on their heel, knowing flesh thrown down in the sunshine dogs shall eat and flesh flung into the air shall be seized by birds, shoulder blades smooth, unmarked by old feather-holes, hands rivered by blue, erratic wanderings of the blood, eyes crinkled shut at almost seeing the drifting sun that gives us our lives.

When first I walked here I hobbled along ties set too close together for a boy to step easily on each. I thought my stride one day would reach every other and from then on I would walk in time with the way toward that Lobachevskian haze up ahead where the two rails meet. Here we put down our pennies, dark, on shined steel; they trembled, fell still; then the locomotive out of Attleboro rattling its berserk wheel-rods into perfect circles, brightened them into wafers, the way a fork mashes into view the inner light of a carrot in a stew. In this late March sunshine, crossing the trees at the angle of a bow when it effleurages out of the chanterelle the C three octaves above middle C, the vertical birthwood remembers its ascent lines, shrunken by half, exactly back down, each tree on its fallen summer. Back then, these rocks often asked blood offerings—but this one, once, asked bone, the time Billy Wallace tripped and broke out his front teeth. Fitted with gold replicas, he asked, speaking more brightly, “What good are golden teeth, given what we’ve got to eat?” Nebuchadnezzar spent seven years down on all fours eating vetch and alfalfa, ruminating the mouth-feel of “bloom” and “wither,” until he was whole. If you held a grass blade between both thumbs and blew hard you could blurt a shriek out of it—like that beseeching leaves oaks didn’t drop last winter just now scratch on a breeze. Maybe Billy, lured by bones’ memory, comes back sometimes, too, to the Seekonk Woods, to stand in the past and just look at it. Here he might kneel, studying this clump of grass, as a god might inspect the strands of a human sneeze that percusses through. Or he might stray into the now untrafficked whistling-lanes of the mourning doves, who used to call and call into the future, and give a start, as though, this very minute, by awful coincidence, they reach it. And at last traipse off down the tracks, with arrhythmic gait, as wanderers must do once they realize: the over-the-unknown route, too, ends up where time wants. On this spot I skinned the muskrat. The musk breezed away. I buried the rat. Of the fur I made a hat, which as soon as put on began to rot off, causing my scalp to crawl. In circles, of course, keeping to the skull. One day could this scrap of damp skin crawl all the way off, and the whole organism follow? To do what? Effuse with musk, or rot with rat? When, a quarter- turn after the sun, the half-moon, too, goes down and we find ourselves in the night's night, then somewhere hereabouts in the dark must be death. Knowledge of it beforehand is surely among existence’s most spectacular feats—and yet right here, on this ordinary afternoon, in these woods, with a name meaning “black goose” in Wampanoag, or in modern Seekonkese, “slob blowing fat nose,” this unlikely event happens—a creature walking the tracks knows it will come. Then too long to touch every tie, his stride is now just too short to reach every other, and so he is to be still the wanderer, the hirtle of too much replaced by the common limp of too little. But he almost got there. Almost stepped in consonance with the liturgical, sleeping gods’ snores you can hear humming up from former times inside the ties. He almost set foot in that border zone where what follows blows back, shimmering everything, making walking like sleepwalking, railroad tracks a country lane on a spring morning, on which a man, limping but blissful, makes his way homeward, his lips, suppled by kissing to bunch up like that, blowing these short strands of hollowed-out air, haunted by future, into a tune on the tracks. I think I’m about to be shocked awake. As I was in childhood, when I battered myself back to my senses against a closed door, or woke up hanging out of an upstairs window. Somnambulism was my attempt to slip under cover of nightmare across no father’s land and embrace a phantasm. If only I had found a way to enter his hard time served at labor by day, by night in solitary, and put my arms around him in reality, I might not now be remaking him in memory still; anti-alchemizing bass kettle’s golden reverberations back down to hair, flesh, blood, bone, the base metals. I want to crawl face down in the fields and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes stained pink, even for seven years if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out on my back under the thousand stars and think my way up among them, through them, and a little distance past them, and attain a moment of absolute ignorance, if I can, if human mentality lets us. I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now. The moment I have done one or the other, I here swear, no one will have to drag me , I’ll come but never will I agree to burn my words. The poplar logs creosoted asleep under the tracks have stopped snoring. Maybe they’ve already waked up. The bow saws at G. An oak leaf rattles on its tree. The rails may never meet, O fellow Euclideans, for you, for me. So what if we groan. That’s our noise. Laughter is our stuttering in a language we can’t speak yet. Behind, the world made of wishes goes dark. Ahead, if not now then never, shines what is.

The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

I can feel she has got out of bed. That means it is seven a.m. I have been lying with eyes shut, thinking, or possibly dreaming, of how she might look if, at breakfast, I spoke about the hidden place in her which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo, and right then, over toast and bramble jelly, if such things are possible, she came. I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it. I imagine her hair would fall about her face and she would become apparently downcast, as she does at a concert when she is moved. The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes and there she is, next to the bed, bending to a low drawer, picking over various small smooth black, white, and pink items of underwear. She bends so low her back runs parallel to the earth, but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun. The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking, lift toward the east—what can I say? Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth. Her breasts fall full; the nipples are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars of the gate under the earth where those who could not love press, wanting to be born again. I reach out and take her wrist and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas. Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again, rummaging in the same low drawer. The clock shows eight. Hmmm. With huge, silent effort of great, mounded muscles the earth has been turning. She takes a piece of silken cloth from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls of hair her face has become quiet and downcast, as if she will be, all day among strangers, looking down inside herself at our rapture.

While spoon-feeding him with one hand she holds his hand with her other hand, or rather lets it rest on top of his, which is permanently clenched shut. When he turns his head away, she reaches around and puts in the spoonful blind. He will not accept the next morsel until he has completely chewed this one. His bright squint tells her he finds the shrimp she has just put in delicious. Next to the voice and touch of those we love, food may be our last pleasure on earth— a man on death row takes his T-bone in small bites and swishes each sip of the jug wine around in his mouth, tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt this supper out of him. She strokes his head very slowly, as if to cheer up each separate discomfited hair sticking up from its root in his stricken brain. Standing behind him, she presses her cheek to his, kisses his jowl, and his eyes seem to stop seeing and do nothing but emit light. Could heaven be a time, after we are dead, of remembering the knowledge flesh had from flesh? The flesh of his face is hard, perhaps from years spent facing down others until they fell back, and harder from years of being himself faced down and falling back in his turn, and harder still from all the while frowning and beaming and worrying and shouting and probably letting go in rages. His face softens into a kind of quizzical wince, as if one of the other animals were working at getting the knack of the human smile. When picking up a cookie he uses both thumbtips to grip it and push it against an index finger to secure it so that he can lift it. She takes him then to the bathroom, where she lowers his pants and removes the wet diaper and holds the spout of the bottle to his old penis until he pisses all he can, then puts on the fresh diaper and pulls up his pants. When they come out, she is facing him, walking backwards in front of him and holding his hands, pulling him when he stops, reminding him to step when he forgets and starts to pitch forward. She is leading her old father into the future as far as they can go, and she is walking him back into her childhood, where she stood in bare feet on the toes of his shoes and they foxtrotted on this same rug. I watch them closely: she could be teaching him the last steps that one day she may teach me. At this moment, he glints and shines, as if it will be only a small dislocation for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

The man splitting wood in the daybreak looks strong, as though, if one weakened, one could turn to him and he would help. Gus Newland was strong. When he split wood he struck hard, flashing the bright steel through the air so hard the hard maple leapt apart, as it’s feared marriages will do in countries reluctant to permit divorce, and even willow, which, though stacked to dry a full year, on being split actually weeps—totem wood, therefore, to the married-until-death—sunders with many little lip-wetting gasp-noises. But Gus is dead. We could turn to our fathers, but they help us only by the unperplexed looking-back of the numerals cut into headstones. Or to our mothers, whose love, so devastated, can’t, even in spring, break through the hard earth. Our spouses weaken at the same rate we do. We have to hold our children up to lean on them. Everyone who could help goes or hasn’t arrived. What about the man splitting wood in the daybreak, who looked strong? That was years ago. That was me.

1 I can support it no longer. Laughing ruefully at myself For all I claim to have suffered I get up. Damned nightmarer! It is New Hampshire out here, It is nearly the dawn. The song of the whippoorwill stops And the dimension of depth seizes everything. 2 The whistles of a peabody bird go overhead Like a needle pushed five times through the air, They enter the leaves, and come out little changed. The air is so still That as they go off through the trees The love songs of birds do not get any fainter. 3 The last memory I have Is of a flower that cannot be touched, Through the bloom of which, all day, Fly crazed, missing bees. 4 As I climb sweat gets up my nostrils, For an instant I think I am at the sea, One summer off Cap Ferrat we watched a black seagull Straining for the dawn, we stood in the surf, Grasshoppers splash up where I step, The mountain laurel crashes at my thighs. 5 There is something joyous in the elegies Of birds. They seem Caught up in a formal delight, Though the mourning dove whistles of despair. But at last in the thousand elegies The dead rise in our hearts, On the brink of our happiness we stop Like someone on a drunk starting to weep. 6 I kneel at a pool, I look through my face At the bacteria I think I see crawling through the moss. My face sees me, The water stirs, the face, Looking preoccupied, Gets knocked from its bones. 7 I weighed eleven pounds At birth, having stayed on Two extra weeks in the womb. Tempted by room and fresh air I came out big as a policeman Blue-faced, with narrow red eyes. It was eight days before the doctor Would scare my mother with me. Turning and craning in the vines I can make out through the leaves The old, shimmering nothingness, the sky. 8 Green, scaly moosewoods ascend, Tenants of the shaken paradise, At every wind last night’s rain Comes splattering from the leaves, It drops in flurries and lies there, The footsteps of some running start. 9 From a rock A waterfall, A single trickle like a strand of wire, Breaks into beads halfway down. I know The birds fly off But the hug of the earth wraps With moss their graves and the giant boulders. 10 In the forest I discover a flower. The invisible life of the thing Goes up in flames that are invisible, Like cellophane burning in the sunlight. It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing. In its covertness it has a way Of uttering itself in place of itself, Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean, A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground. The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting you were beautiful; goodbye, Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain brown envelopes for the return of your very “Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues give the fullest treatment in literature yet to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin, who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,” instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long, neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites: I swear to you, it was just my way of cheering myself up, as I licked the stamped, self-addressed envelopes, the game I had of trying to guess which one of you, this time, had poisoned his glue. I did care. I did read each poem entire. I did say everything I thought in the mildest words I knew. And now, in this poem, or chopped prose, no better, I realize, than those troubled lines I kept sending back to you, I have to say I am relieved it is over: at the end I could feel only pity for that urge toward more life your poems kept smothering in words, the smell of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses to write. Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell— their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.

He lives, who last night flopped from a log Into the creek, and all night by an ankle Lay pinned to the flood, dead as a nail But for the skin of the teeth of his dog. I brought him boiled eggs and broth. He coughed and waved his spoon And sat up saying he would dine alone, Being fatigue itself after that bath. I sat without in the sun with the dog. Wearing a stocking on the ailing foot, In monster crutches, he hobbled out, And addressed the dog in bitter rage. He told the yellow hound, his rescuer, Its heart was bad, and it ought Not wander by the creek at night; If all his dogs got drowned he would be poor. He stroked its head and disappeared in the shed And came out with a stone mallet in his hands And lifted that rocky weight of many pounds And let it lapse on top of the dog's head. I carted off the carcass, dug it deep. Then he came too with what a thing to lug, Or pour on a dog’s grave, his thundermug, And poured it out and went indoors to sleep. I saw him sleepless in the pane of glass Looking wild-eyed at sunset, then the glare Blinded the glass—only a red square Burning a house burning in the wilderness.

1 In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow and bend close and see it is lung-colored and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear. 2 I take a wolf’s rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears. And when it has vanished I move out on the bear tracks, roaming in circles until I come to the first, tentative, dark splash on the earth. And I set out running, following the splashes of blood wandering over the world. At the cut, gashed resting places I stop and rest, at the crawl-marks where he lay out on his belly to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice I lie out dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists. 3 On the third day I begin to starve, at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would at a turd sopped in blood, and hesitate, and pick it up, and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down, and rise and go on running. 4 On the seventh day, living by now on bear blood alone, I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled, steamy hulk, the heavy fur riffling in the wind. I come up to him and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes, the dismayed face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils flared, catching perhaps the first taint of me as he died. I hack a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink, and tear him down his whole length and open him and climb in and close him up after me, against the wind, and sleep. 5 And dream of lumbering flatfooted over the tundra, stabbed twice from within, splattering a trail behind me, splattering it out no matter which way I lurch, no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence, which dance of solitude I attempt, which gravity-clutched leap, which trudge, which groan. 6 Until one day I totter and fall— fall on this stomach that has tried so hard to keep up, to digest the blood as it leaked in, to break up and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze blows over me, blows off the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood and rotted stomach and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear, blows across my sore, lolled tongue a song or screech, until I think I must rise up and dance. And I lie still. 7 I awaken I think. Marshlights reappear, geese come trailing again up the flyway. In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear lies, licking lumps of smeared fur and drizzly eyes into shapes with her tongue. And one hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me, the next groaned out, the next, the next, the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?