209 Nostalgia poems

TO A FRIEND No! those days are gone away And their hours are old and gray, And their minutes buried all Under the down-trodden pall Of the leaves of many years: Many times have winter's shears, Frozen North, and chilling East, Sounded tempests to the feast Of the forest's whispering fleeces, Since men knew nor rent nor leases. No, the bugle sounds no more, And the twanging bow no more; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill; There is no mid-forest laugh, Where lone Echo gives the half To some wight, amaz'd to hear Jesting, deep in forest drear. On the fairest time of June You may go, with sun or moon, Or the seven stars to light you, Or the polar ray to right you; But you never may behold Little John, or Robin bold; Never one, of all the clan, Thrumming on an empty can Some old hunting ditty, while He doth his green way beguile To fair hostess Merriment, Down beside the pasture Trent; For he left the merry tale Messenger for spicy ale. Gone, the merry morris din; Gone, the song of Gamelyn; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw Idling in the "grenè shawe"; All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be cast Sudden from his turfed grave, And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall'n beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas; She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her—strange! that honey Can't be got without hard money! So it is: yet let us sing, Honour to the old bow-string! Honour to the bugle-horn! Honour to the woods unshorn! Honour to the Lincoln green! Honour to the archer keen! Honour to tight little John, And the horse he rode upon! Honour to bold Robin Hood, Sleeping in the underwood! Honour to maid Marian, And to all the Sherwood-clan! Though their days have hurried by Let us two a burden try.

I went back, as to my relatives. When I arrived, the elms had been shaved. But you were all the same. The buildings, the dry classrooms. I embraced your eyes, your avenues. You were fixed in the same expressions. Your flat voices, your dental work, like your lips, slipping over words already said. Additional agricultural pamphlets; many of you sat in private offices. Why did I think I could drag it all back, the former edge of town where streets ended in fields under clouds puffed like the French phrases he kissed me with in the sucked-in breath of that illusive happiness. Coming back, listening, looking; ready to take your bodies in my hands. Returning to streets that had poured heavy shopping malls over the hay-sweet grass where he and I lay whispering the most important nonsense of my desperate and embittered life.

How burdensome they seemed, wartime oldies that could drive our parents teary: “I’ll Be Seeing You,” with its hint of being swept off in a global riptide; or the shaky follow-up of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” followed by a shakier “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else But Me),” “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” or “Ac- Cent-Tchu-Are the Positive.” We suffered them on the old cathedral radio, crooned by Crosby and Sinatra, had to watch them strangled on The Lawrence Welk Show or laced with Como’s heavy dose of sedative. Dad told us, “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Mom hummed, “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—till our music cut the cord. Brash and free of corn, it hailed rock ‘n’ roll, caught Maybellene at the top of the hill, moaned “m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll.” We played it loud and often, but they never understood.

I don’t belong in this century—who does? In my time, summer came someplace in June— The cutbanks blazing with roses, the birds brazen, and the astonished Pastures frisking with young calves . . . That was in the country— I don’t mean another country, I mean in the country: And the country is lost. I don’t mean just lost to me, Nor in the way of metaphorical loss—it’s lost that way too— No; nor in no sort of special case: I mean Lost. Now, down below, in the fire and stench, the city Is building its shell: elaborate levels of emptiness Like some sea-animal building toward its extinction. And the citizens, unserious and full of virtue, Are hunting for bread, or money, or a prayer, And I behold them, and this season of man, without love. If it were not a joke, it would be proper to laugh. —Curious how that rat’s nest holds together— Distracting . . . Without it there might be, still, The gold wheel and the silver, the sun and the moon, The season’s ancient assurance under the unstable stars Our fiery companions . . . And trees, perhaps, and the sound Of the wild and living water hurrying out of the hills. Without these, I have you for my talisman: Sun, moon, the four seasons, The true voice of the mountains. Now be (The city revolving in its empty shell, The night moving in from the East) —Be thou these things.

The heat shimmer along our street one midsummer midafternoon, and wading up through it a horse’s hooves, and each shoe raising a tongueless bell that tolled in the neighborhood, till the driver drew in the reins and the horse hung its head and stood. And something in a basket thin as shavings (blackberries? or a ghost of the memory of having tasted them?) passing into my hands as mother paid, and the man got up again, slapping the loop from the reins, and was off on his trundling wagon.

I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight, A-purpose to revisit the old claim. I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate, And the lads who once were with me in the game. Poor boys, they’re down-and-outers, and there’s scarcely one to-day Can show a dozen colors in his poke; And me, I’m still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray, And I’m looking for a grub-stake, and I’m broke. I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down; The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me; But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town, Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see. There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan, And turning round a bend I heard a roar, And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore. It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung; It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs; Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung; It glared around with fierce electric eyes. Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more; It looked like some great monster in the gloom. With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score, And I sighed: “Ah, old-time miner, here’s your doom!” The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls; The holes you digged are water to the brim; Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls Are deathly now and mouldering and dim. The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out; The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold. But there’s a little army that they’ll never put to rout — The men who simply live to seek the gold. The men who can’t remember when they learned to swing a pack, Or in what lawless land the quest began; The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back, The restless buccaneer of pick and pan. On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North, You will find us, changed in face but still the same; And it isn’t need, it isn’t greed that sends us faring forth — It’s the fever, it’s the glory of the game. For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust, Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell; It’s little else you care about; you go because you must, And you feel that you could follow it to hell. You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold; You’d follow it in solitude and pain; And when you’re stiff and battened down let someone whisper “Gold,” You’re lief to rise and follow it again. Yet look you, if I find the stuff it’s just like so much dirt; I fling it to the four winds like a child. It’s wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt, Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild. Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent — There’s a city, there’s an army (hear them shout). There’s the gold in millions, millions, but I haven’t got a cent; And oh, it’s me, it’s me that found it out. It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go To lands of dread and death disprized of man; But oh, I’ve known a glory that their hearts will never know, When I picked the first big nugget from my pan. It’s still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast; That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before — My dream that will uplift me to the last. Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there’s none of you too sane; It’s just a little matter of degree. My hobby is to hunt out gold; it’s fortressed in my brain; It’s life and love and wife and home to me. And I’ll strike it, yes, I’ll strike it; I’ve a hunch I cannot fail; I’ve a vision, I’ve a prompting, I’ve a call; I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail, To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all. Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky There’s a lowering land no white man ever struck; There’s gold, there’s gold in millions, and I’ll find it if I die. And I’m going there once more to try my luck. Maybe I’ll fail — what matter? It’s a mandate, it’s a vow; And when in lands of dreariness and dread You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now, You will find the old prospector, silent, dead. You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it; You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod; You will find the claim I’m seeking, with my bones as stakes to show it; But I’ve sought the last Recorder, and He’s — God.

What's left is footage: the hours before Camille, 1969—hurricane parties, palm trees leaning in the wind, fronds blown back, a woman's hair. Then after: the vacant lots, boats washed ashore, a swamp where graves had been. I recall how we huddled all night in our small house, moving between rooms, emptying pots filled with rain. The next day, our house— on its cinderblocks—seemed to float in the flooded yard: no foundation beneath us, nothing I could see tying us                      to the land. In the water, our reflection trembled, disappeared when I bent to touch it.

There was always a lizard Or a frog around the pump, Waiting for a little extra water Or a butterfly to light. Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms. I got the worms under the slick boards. The pump would bite you in the winter. It got hold of Jimmy and wouldn’t let go. The blades of Johnson grass were tall And sharp around the pump stand. I had to hoe them all the time Nobody filled the prime jar, though. One time, I cut the tongue Out of a Buster Brown shoe And gave it to the pump. It made a good sucker washer. Sometimes the pump seemed like Jesus. I liked bathing buck naked Under the pump, Not in a goddamn washtub.

Once we played at love together— Played it smartly, if you please; Lightly, as a windblown feather, Did we stake a heart apiece. Oh, it was delicious fooling! In the hottest of the game, Without thought of future cooling, All too quickly burned Life’s flame. In this give-and-take of glances, Kisses sweet as honey dews, When we played with equal chances, Did you win, or did I lose?

You are running away from everyone who loves you, from your family, from old lovers, from friends. They run after you with accumulations of a former life, copper earrings, plates of noodles, banners of many lost revolutions. You love to say the trees are naked now because it never happens in your country. This is a mystery from which you will never recover. And yes, the trees are naked now, everything that still breathes in them lies silent and stark and waiting. You love October most of all, how there is no word for so much splendor. This, too, is a source of consolation. Between you and memory everything is water. Names of the dead, or saints, or history. There is a realm in which —no, forget it, it’s still too early to make anyone understand. A man drives a stake through his own heart and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves and the leaves take over and again he has learned to let go.