John Engels

When in Wisconsin where I once had time the flyway swans came whistling to the rotten Green Bay ice and stayed, not feeding, four days, maybe five, I shouted and threw stones to see them fly. Blue herons followed, or came first. I shot a bittern’s wing off with my gun. For that my wife could cry. My neighbor’s wife mistook the spawning frogs for wood ducks nesting the white pines up on Bean Hill: I straightway set her right. Each April, on the first rainy night I lantern-hunt for salamanders where they hide, toewalking the bottom mucks and muds. I shudder at the scored skin of their sides, the deep flesh tucks. In hand, they dry. I walk in frogspawn jellies on my lawns. One time I hoped the great white birds might brake for the frog ditch and alight, but all the addled past falls in on itself, splash rings close inward on the rising stone, my gun sucks fire, the bone becomes whole bone, light narrows back on point and filament, the forest turns to sand, and only season lacking source rolls round and round, till I in my turns fall forever back clutching my stone, my gun, my light. When in Wisconsin where I once had time and spring beasts gorged my marrows and my tongue, I was not blind: the red eft clambered in my eye.

1 In prologue let me plainly say I shall not ever come to that discretion where I do not rage to think I grow decrepit, bursten-bellied, bald and toothless, thick of hearing, tremulous of leg, dry and rough-barked as a hemlock slab, the soft rot setting in and all my wheezy dreams the tunnelling of beetles in a raspy bark. For now I am fleshed at smaller sports, and grow in time into the mineral thick fell of earth; Vermont hairy with violets, roses, lilies and like minions and darlings of the spring, meantime working wonders, rousing astonishments. And being a humble man, I at the same time acknowledge my miscreate: the nightshades, cabbages and fleaworts of my plot, though always I try to turn my back and scorn upon the inkhorn term and speak as is most commonly received with smile and wink and approbative nod, not overfine nor at the same time reckless of the phrase, nor ever ugly, turdy, tut-mouthed, but always joyous at the goosey brain, the woolpack of the solid cloud, a crowd, a heap, a troop, a plume of trees, grass, gulls and rabbits, in the end, no doubt, a vulgar prattle: but the planet swells and bulges and protrudes beyond my eyes’ aversions, and tottery, fuddled, always I give up, I am not understood, or wrongly, out of some general assumption of my innocence. 2 This much I wish to say, my nonesuch, nosegay native sweet, in someway plainer, this is my letter to you, and out of most severe purpose: the bee, the honey stalk, the whole keep of the house endanger me: the perspectives of the clapboard, the steep falls of the lawn, the razory apices of ridges, and the abdominous curves of the meadow into the far trees. There are ponds below the house, and water runs. The road crosses the water, and the road diminishes to the reach of the next farm, and the farm beyond that, and two miles bearing right or left somewhere runs Highway 25. I have found my way with difficulty, I am confused, halfway I have suffered a failure of vital powers, a swoon, have been smirked at by the natives, and misdirected. Fitting, for I always dream of the painless redemption, the return from fiasco and tumultuous journey to the transcendentally serene lawns of a transcendentally white house with columns of oak trees and iron deer and the affectionate greeting of One who has these many years waited in full patience, without complaint, for me to come in bleeding, dusty and deliquescent from the fields, the blade in my thigh, or blinded, the victim of fire or ravenous birds, the lovely blood on my cheek like tears, one-limbed, a bullet in my heart, my hands, my head cut off and the dark pulses of my blood diminishing. Yet never a reproach for my criminal self-negligence, my careless japeries and clumsy flounderings: instead, my brow is wiped, my wounds attended to, blood let, leeches applied: I heal, I grow strong, I can set forth again renewed, valiant, sturdy, full of high spirits, lively, gay, spruce in looks, a reveler, a merry prankster, dimpled in the cheek from smiling, perfect Pilgrim, fit for the chemistry of the Resurrection. Yet I am of wild and changeful moods. I am perhaps worthy of being stoned, sometimes. I lie hid and lurk in wait for the giggling girleries and leap out and shout and scatter them like chickens from the boot to the safe and flying four winds. I am easy and fluent in the telling of lies, and let it be said that I roar and sing scurrilous songs in base places, and shall no doubt for this little vain merriment find a sorrowful reckoning in the end. Still, my noises please me, and what this wretched poet overmuch desires, he easily believes. It is his conventional cowardice, it makes him immortally glad. But then he always grows morose (that is in his favor), he repents, lances his soul, thinks of the willows and the columned porch and the wind melliloquent about the chimneys, and you from where he sits now at the far end of this small porch of a Federal farmhouse in this very and summery Vermont. 3 I look down the pitches of the lawn: fireflies make small explosions among the grass stems, and I think that to walk down that slant of lawn to the black waters of the brook at the dark join of the cleft would be like dying, and that if I die I will never pardon time. I think my words will echo only in my own mind forever, to what purpose I do not know I see a firefly trapped inside the screen. I have no name for any of this; I know it clearly in the same way I know the dead cry of the starlings in the eaves, the smell of after rain, the warm air holding in the hollows of the roads. For this there is no name. The holding mind is likewise without name. That is the final thought, it is the disorder, the reason for all this. The clouds begin to reach up Blood Mountain, and I am sitting on a farmhouse porch, and there are trees, and it is late and I am dreaming that I dream I stare down into a fouled well and see the white legbones of a deer and the water’s surface matte with loose hair, the green stink welling and bellying from the fertile sump up and flowing outwards in a fountaining current of vines and melons and leaves and the knotgrass lawns blossoming with gilliflowers, shoulder-high, cloud-high, the sun finally smothering in grass, and then in the entire silence of this growth the grasses thickening, darkening, becoming clouds, reaching up from the ridges. And all night there is rain. I dream that when I awaken it is a shining milky day, four roosters are crowing in the yard and geese dabble in the green soft muds of the ditches. This is the literal surface, and for all the extravagance of what has gone before I now repent, and make an image: All of Vermont each night blazes with fireflies, the comet is a faint green phosphorescence to the North, the catalpas blossom and each noon the sunlight hardens, and the sky is a clear ground, and I can look from my open doorway into dry and fiery yards. You see, I draw back always, I cannot be understood.O I wud slepe all the swete darkemans, nor ever speke!

In one dream I am made watchful. In this dream the name we never clearly have heard is spoken, which name, if we knew and could speak it, would call back to us those whom in time we will have come to love and who will die; would bring them back to us like us abandoned again to his terrible consequence, the silence between us forever affirmed. And in whatever might constitute the pardon would come down in a fragile rain the whole matter of all we will ever love, the whole fiery blade of space, ten billions of suns suddenly blossoming small and cool as snowdrops over the opening graves, the world shimmering with the blue delicate membrane of the fallen sky, while above us the forsaken voice calls out come back come back as if calling the name each of us had long forgotten until that very instant not remembered as proper to our hearts.

The damselfly folds its wings over its body when at rest. Captured, it should not be killed in cyanide, but allowed to die slowly: then the colors, especially the reds and blues, will last. In the hand it crushes easily into a rosy slime. Its powers of flight are weak. The trout feeds on the living damselfly. The trout leaps up from the water, and if there is sun you see the briefest shiver of gold, and then the river again. When the trout dies it turns its white belly to the mirror of the sky. The heron fishes for the trout in the gravelly shallows on the far side of the stream. The heron is the exact blue of the shadows the sun makes of trees on water. When you hold the heron most clearly in your eye, you are least certain it is there. When the blue heron dies, it lies beyond reach on the far side of the river.

Water sheets on the old stone of the cellar walls, trickles out over the floor into little deltas of mud, worse every year, so that now I can see daylight at the footings, and upstairs the floors sometimes tremble and the clothes go damp in the closets. And sometimes I think the whole place is about to come down, and have begun to dream at night of moving, unaccountably sad to think of leaving this house which has possessed me now for eighteen years, in which one of us has died and two been born, for all its elegance of detail most everything not right in it, or long gone bad, nothing ever done which should have been, one hundred years and more of water rancid in the cellars, moldings never finished or else mitred crookedly, all the small and growing energies of dirt and rot wherever we care to look, whenever we do. And we do. But I dream also of the pine grove of my planting, which I know I love and which is the green truth of this place: in one day ten years ago I dug fourteen small trees, wrapped the roots in burlap, dragged them down from the top ridge of the hill, spaced them carefully, watered them each day for one whole season. Now they are twenty feet high, thick roots already at the cellar wall, vigorous and loud even in little winds, only the hemlock mournful and reluctant to do much in the way of increasing itself. But it is clear that if I do not freely leave this place, it will leave me—though, as Ray Reynolds says, digging at a powdery floor joist with his knife, there may be more here than I think, better than a two-by-six at least; and his blade slides two inches in and stops at what he calls the heartwood, meaning, as I take it, at the wood which has not yet given way.