Jane Kenyon

The young bull dropped his head and stared. Only a wispy wire—electrified—kept us apart. That, and two long rows of asparagus. An ancient apple tree blossomed prodigally pink and white. The muddy path sucked at my shoe, but I reached the granite step, and knocked at the rickety porch door. Deep in the house a dog began to bark. I had prepared my Heart Fund speech, and the first word—When—was on my tongue. I heard no steps—only the breeze riffling the tender poplar leaves, and a random, meditative moo behind me. . . . Relieved, I turned back to the car, passing once more under the bull’s judicial eye. . . . Everything was intact: the canister, still far too light and mute, and metal boutonnières where they began— in a zip-lock plastic sandwich bag.

Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.

The grasses in the field have toppled, and in places it seems that a large, now absent, animal must have passed the night. The hay will right itself if the day turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully. None of your blustering entrances or exits, doors swinging wildly on their hinges, or your huge unconscious sighs when you read something sad, like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan, where he traveled after Clover died. Everything blooming bows down in the rain: white irises, red peonies; and the poppies with their black and secret centers lie shattered on the lawn.

There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night. It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens, to rain falling on the open sea, to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

The young man, hardly more than a boy, who fired the shot had looked at him with an air not of anger but of concentration, as if he were surveying a road, or feeding a length of wood into a saw: It had to be done just so. The bullet passed through his upper chest, below the collar bone. The pain was not what he might have feared. Strangely exhilarated he staggered out of the pasture and into a grove of trees. He pressed and pressed the wound, trying to stanch the blood, but he could only press what he could reach, and he could not reach his back, where the bullet had exited. He lay on the earth smelling the leaves and mosses, musty and damp and cool after the blaze of open afternoon. How good the earth smelled, as it had when he was a boy hiding from his father, who was intent of strapping him for doing his chores late one time too many. A cowbird razzed from a rail fence. It isn't mockery, he thought, no malice in it. . . just a noise. Stray bullets nicked the oaks overhead. Leaves and splinters fell. Someone near him groaned. But it was his own voice he heard. His fingers and feet tingled, the roof of his mouth, and the bridge of his nose. . . . He became dry, dry, and thought of Christ, who said,I thirst. His man-smell, the smell of his hair and skin, his sweat, the salt smell of his cock and the little ferny hairs that two women had known left him, and a sharp, almost sweet smell began to rise from his open mouth in the warm shade of the oaks. A streak of sun climbed the rough trunk of a tree, but he did not see it with his open eye.

The dog and I push through the ring of dripping junipers to enter the open space high on the hill where I let him off the leash. He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss; twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth; his pink tongue lolls. I look for sticks of proper heft to throw for him, while he sits, prim and earnest in his love, if it is love. All night a soaking rain, and now the hill exhales relief, and the fragrance of warm earth. . . . The sedges have grown an inch since yesterday, and ferns unfurled, and even if they try the lilacs by the barn can’t keep from opening today. I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens, and the white-throated sparrow’s call that borders on rudeness. Do you know— since you went away all I can do is wait for you to come back to me.

Her sickness brought me to Connecticut. Mornings I walk the dog: that part of life is intact. Who's painted, who's insulated or put siding on, who's burned the lawn with lime—that's the news on Ardmore Street. The leaves of the neighbor's respectable rhododendrons curl under in the cold. He has backed the car through the white nimbus of its exhaust and disappeared for the day. In the hiatus between mayors the city has left leaves in the gutters, and passing cars lift them in maelstroms. We pass the house two doors down, the one with the wildest lights in the neighborhood, an establishment without irony. All summer their putto empties a water jar, their St. Francis feeds the birds. Now it's angels, festoons, waist-high candles, and swans pulling sleighs. Two hundred miles north I'd let the dog run among birches and the black shade of pines. I miss the hills, the woods and stony streams, where the swish of jacket sleeves against my sides seems loud, and a crow caws sleepily at dawn. By now the streams must run under a skin of ice, white air-bubbles passing erratically, like blood cells through a vein. Soon the mail, forwarded, will begin to reach me here.

I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . . I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper.... When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . . I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . . I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. . . . I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden. . . . I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge. . . . I am the heart contracted by joy. . . . the longest hair, white before the rest. . . . I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. . . . I am the musk rose opening unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . . I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name. . . .

Like primitives we buried the cat with his bowl. Bare-handed we scraped sand and gravel back into the hole. It fell with a hiss and thud on his side, on his long red fur, the white feathers that grew between his toes, and his long, not to say aquiline, nose. We stood and brushed each other off. There are sorrows much keener than these. Silent the rest of the day, we worked, ate, stared, and slept. It stormed all night; now it clears, and a robin burbles from a dripping bush like the neighbor who means well but always says the wrong thing.

On the way to the village store I drive through a down-draft from the neighbor’s chimney. Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves backlit by sun, reminding me of the fire and sulfur of Grandmother’s vengeful God, the one who disapproves of jeans and shorts for girls, dancing, strong waters, and adultery. A moment later the smoke enters the car, although the windows are tight, insinuating that I might, like Judas, and the foolish virgins, and the rich young man, have been made for unquenchable fire. God will need something to burn if the fire is to be unquenchable. “All things work together for the good for those who love God,” she said to comfort me at Uncle Hazen’s funeral, where Father held me up to see the maroon gladiolus that trembled as we approached the bier, the elaborate shirred satin, brass fittings, anything, oh, anything but Uncle’s squelched and made-up face. “No! NO! How is it good to be dead?” I cried afterward, wild-eyed and flushed. “God’s ways are not our ways,” she said then out of pity and the wish to forestall the argument.