Hayden Carruth

You rose from our embrace and the small light spread like an aureole around you. The long parabola of neck and shoulder, flank and thigh I saw permute itself through unfolding and unlimited minuteness in the movement of your tall tread, the spine-root swaying, the Picasso-like éclat of scissoring slender legs. I knew some law of Being was at work. At one time I had said that love bestows such values, and so it does, but the old man in his canto was right and wise: ubi amor ibi ocullus est. Always I wanted to give and in wanting was the poet. A man now, aging, I know the best of love is not to bestow, but to recognize.

I sing of Morrisville (if you call this cry a song). I (if you call this painful voice by that great name) sing the poverty of my region and of the wrong end of Morrisville. You summer people will say that all its ends are wrong, but there, right there, the very end of the wrong end— a house with windows sagging, leaning roadward as in defense or maybe defiance next to the granite ledge, our cliff of broken stone that shoulders our dilapidated one-lane iron bridge. Who lives here? I don’t know. But they (Hermes reward them) made this extraordinary garden, geraniums, petunias and nasturtiums planted in every crevice and all the footholds of the cliff. And then they painted the cliff-face, painted the old stone; no design, just swatches of color, bold rough splashes irregularly, garish orange and livid blue. Is it fluorescent, do these stones glow in the dark? Maybe. I only know they glow in the day, so vivid I stopped my car, whereupon two others came inquiring also, two crows in the broken spars of the white pine tree, cawing above the house. Why had those who inhabited this corner of poverty painted the stones? Was it that the flowers in living bravery nevertheless made too meager a show for the ruined cliff? Or did they think to bring art to nature, somehow to improve this corner of ugliness? For my part I thought how these colors were beautiful and yet strange in their beauty, ugly colors, garish orange, livid blue; they reminded me of those Spanish cemeteries I saw in New Mexico, tin mirrors and plastic flowers in the desert. Then I knew why the stones had been painted: to make reparation, such as the poor might make, whose sorrow had been done here, this desecration. Is not this the burden of all poor lands everywhere, the basis of poverty? A spoiled land makes spoiled people. The poor know this. I guess the crows know too, because off they flew, cawing above the bridge and the slashed hills surrounding Morrisville. I started my car and drove out on the iron bridge which rumbled its sullen affirmation. And I sang as I sing now (if you care to call it song) my people of Morrisville who live where all the ends are wrong.

Scrambled eggs and whiskey in the false-dawn light. Chicago, a sweet town, bleak, God knows, but sweet. Sometimes. And weren’t we fine tonight? When Hank set up that limping treble roll behind me my horn just growled and I thought my heart would burst. And Brad M. pressing with the soft stick, and Joe-Anne singing low. Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home. But don’t say a word, don’t tell a soul, they wouldn’t understand, they couldn’t, never in a million years, how fine, how magnificent we were in that old club tonight.

Was I so poor in those damned days that I went in the dark in torn shoes and furtiveness to steal fat ears of cattle corn from the good cows and pound them like hard maize on my worn Aztec stone? I was.

You died. And because you were Greek they gave you a coin to carry under your tongue and then also biscuits and honey. When you came to the riverbank you saw a crazy-looking black bumboat on the water with a figure standing in it, lanky and dressed darkly, holding a sweep. You were taken across, and you gave your coin for the passage, and continued until you came to a three-headed dog, who snarled and threatened you, even though you were not trying to escape. You gave him the biscuits smeared with honey, and you passed onward to the field of asphodel and through the gate of Tartarus. Or you died and you were Navajo. They had carried you out of the hogan earlier so you’d die in the sunshine. Or if it happened inside suddenly, they stuffed up the smokehole and boarded the front entrance, and cut an opening in the back, the north-facing, dark-facing side, to carry you out, and no one ever used that hogan again. They took off your moccasins and put them on again wrong side to, the left one on the right foot, the right on the left, so that your chindi would be confused and unable to return along your tracks. They washed your hair in suds made from the yucca. Then they gave you enough fried bread and water to last four days, and you set off on your journey. But actually none of these things happened. You just died.

Liebe, meine liebe, I had not hoped to be so poor The night winds reach like the blind breath of the world in a rhythm without mind, gusting and beating as if to destroy us, battering our poverty and all the land’s flat and cold and dark under iron snow the dog leaps in the wind barking, maddened with winter, and his voice claps again and again down the valley like tatters of revolutionary pennants birches cry and hemlocks by the brook stand hunched and downcast with their hands in their pockets Liebe, the world is wild and without intention how far this might be from the night of Christmas if it were not for you. Down the reaching wind shrieks of starlight bear broken messages among mountains where shadows plunge yet our brightness is unwavering Kennst du das land wo die zitronen blühn, im dunkeln laub die goldorangen ... liebe

The northern lights.         I wouldn’t have noticed them if the deer hadn’t told me a doe         her coat of pearls         her glowing hoofs proud and inquisitive eager for my appraisal and I went out into the night with electrical steps but with my head held also proud to share the animal’s fear and see what I had seen before a sky flaring and spectral greenish waves and ribbons and the snow         under strange light         tossing in the pasture like a storming ocean caught by a flaring beacon. The deer stands away from me         not far there among bare black apple trees a presence I no longer see. We are proud to be afraid proud to share the silent magnetic storm that destroys the stars and flickers around our heads like the saints’ cold spiritual agonies of old. I remember         but without the sense         other light-storms cold memories discursive and philosophical in my mind’s burden and the deer remembers nothing. We move our feet         crunching bitter snow         while the storm crashes like god-wars down the east we shake the sparks from our eyes we quiver inside our shocked fur we search for each other in the apple thicket— a glimpse, an acknowledgment it is enough and never enough— we toss our heads         and say good night moving away on bitter bitter snow.

Both of us had been close to Joel, and at Joel’s death my friend had gone to the wake and the memorial service and more recently he had visited Joel’s grave, there at the back of the grassy cemetery among the trees, “a quiet, gentle place,” he said, “befitting Joel.” And I said, “What’s the point of going to look at graves?” I went into one of my celebrated tirades. “People go to look at the grave of Keats or Hart Crane, they go traveling just to do it, what a waste of time. What do they find there? Hell, I wouldn’t go look at the grave of Shakespeare if it was just down the street. I wouldn’t look at—” And I stopped. I was about to say the grave of God until I realized I’m looking at it all the time....

I just had the old Dodge in the shop with that same damned front-end problem, and I was out, so to speak, for a test run, loafing along, maybe 35 m.p.h., down the old Corvallis road, holding her out of the ruts and potholes. That’s out in Montana, the Bitterroot Valley. Long ways from home is how they say it. Long ways from home, boys, long long ways from home. Might as well not put this clunker in the shop and keep my hard-earned in my pocket, she wobbles and humps like a scared rabbit. But it’s a real fine summer day in Corvallis, and I’m loafing along watching the sprayers do their slow drag on the fields of alfalfa, and I come to a side road with a little green sign says “Kurtz Lane” and I said to myself out loud, “Mistah Kurtz—he alive. Him doing just fine,” because of the sign, you see, and because I’m lonesome and maybe kind of bitter in spite of the sunshine. It’s still a goddamn long ways from home. That’s one thing, though, that Heart of Darkness, I read that story every year, I never forget that crazy old son-of-a-bitch, that Kurtz. And the next thing I see about a quarter-mile down the road is somebody small on the shoulder, a kid looking for a ride home, I figure. And he’s a kid all right, maybe ten or eleven, but no Montana boy, he’s an Oriental, one of those Laotians that got resettled. Can’t figure why they brought them to Montana. He’s got those big eyes and caved-in cheeks like the pictures on the TV during Vietnam, and his mouth is open a little. I say to myself, I’ll give him a ride if he wants, and I even begin to slow down, but he didn’t put up his thumb. Just when I went by, he waved, real quick and shy, but still like he was trying to reach me. I drove on. Then I bust out crying.

Coming home with the last load I ride standing on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor in hot exhaust, lank with sweat, my arms strung awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform. Almost 500 bales we’ve put up this afternoon, Marshall and I. And of course I think of another who hung like this on another cross. My hands are torn by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain in the rising monoxide, recall that greater suffering. Well, I change grip and the image fades. It’s been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop, but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed. Now is our last chance to bring in the winter’s feed, and Marshall needs help. We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales to the barn, these late, half-green, improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds or more, yet must be lugged by the twine across the field, tossed on the load, and then at the barn unloaded on the conveyor and distributed in the loft. I help— I, the desk-servant, word-worker— and hold up my end pretty well too; but God, the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe. I think of those who have done slave labor, less able and less well prepared than I. Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony, her father in the camps of Moldavia and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands too bloodied cannot bear even the touch of air, even the touch of love. I have a friend whose grandmother cut cane with a machete and cut and cut, until one day she snicked her hand off and took it and threw it grandly at the sky. Now in September our New England mountains under a clear sky for which we’re thankful at last begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches in their first color. I look beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills, to the notch where the sunset is beginning, then in the other direction, eastward, where a full new-risen moon like a pale medallion hangs in a lavender cloud beyond the barn. My eyes sting with sweat and loveliness. And who is the Christ now, who if not I? It must be so. My strength is legion. And I stand up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say woe to you, watch out you sons of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields where they can only die.