Forget understanding. There will be none.
A condition natural as weather is between us.
Our lives are in separate airs. Our memories
are seas and mountains: sometime and for a while
in sight of one another, but across an element.
You mountain Congregationalists—will you believe
however faithfully at every risk
I dredge it from myself, the existence of squid?
I carry an oar on my shoulder, and who
in all these uplands can know it moves a world?
You sea-going mackerel-snatchers at the sputtery
pumps—
would you answer, though I break my back for it,
to September hay sweated from ledges
in the sight of four weathers at once
there in the sluices and bowls below my footing?
Whatever is, is the natural day of who goes there.
II
It takes a habit of living. Poetry
is the family talk of the generations:
you have to have lived in the house of that name.
When an outsider happens in, it stops or changes.
The young, being someways truest, prattle
to confuse him. The old may try, for politeness,
to say a little something. But whatever
was going on there round the table,
or by the fire, or squealing through the hall,
dressing, undressing, and piggy-back to bed
whatever was going on before the stranger
came popping smalltalk from somewherever else
the faces sit rearranged and the fun is over.
III
Is it possible to say it without memories?
as if in answer to a questionnaire, squared
like columns in a statistician’s eye?
It is a plain thing. Plain enough for saying.
A white elk, for that matter, once you come on it,
is as visible as a jackass: there it is!
The trick is to happen next to it and
to be living there where it happens. I’ve known men
to see that elk and think it was a ground hog.
It is a plain thing, then, but one must be ready.
I can see it as it is: I cannot name it
by any names you know. “Poetry,” I say,
and you think of Longfellow, and I
of the race in its going: the family at its days:
the young at the edge of the thicket where that elk
sleeps.
I mean the thing behind the name of the thing.
IV
Perhaps it could start with an exchange of pictures:
you may think of me as a knob-kneed wheezy paunch,
too old to hunt, but left on guard at the cavemouth.
(There is more than that to it, but that will do.
I sit here watching the cubs spill in the sun,
and think “Tonight I will try again to carve an
elkhead.”
It is something to think about, a way
of leaving that much of myself to the cave forever
if I can remember truly the lines of that head.) You
are also a man of ideas. I see you
(you must not let the change of time and scene
confuse you: this is all times and all scenes:
I speak for the family in all its ages)
-I see you as also the keeper of a propriety
both in your nakedness, and naked but wearing a collar.
You are something and believe something (that
is not necessarily the same thing). And you distrust me
with your certainties: I waste the family’s time.
It was so I met you once in Florida
in the image of a Baptist graduate student
who told me that the Absolute in Aesthetics
was the same as the Absolute in everything else.
When I asked what that might be, he tossed his mane,
and pointing his finger and his whole arm, said:
“The Triune God!”—Now suppose you’re as saved as
he is
(as all of you are somewhere inside yourselves)
how shall I not be read in your own image?
And how shall I carve that Elk’s head
which is the Elk’s head truly remembered, the presence
of life in the thicket named for my hunting tribe
the picture of themselves my people are?
V
I am of those whose totem the Elk is:
by the scars of his horns I wear, by the steam of his
blood
when we opened the winter kill, by the bread of his
body.
This is a plain thing, known to all my people.
I can tell you no more about it. It is time
to think very truly the line of that head to make it.
It is that line I am when I have learned it.
VI
It can also be half seen half truly.
I could show you what an elk is,
even what a white elk is, but can I
show you, or you see, the elk in his stance,
musky and rank in the great steam of his presence?
It is in the elk and equally in the life
of the elk people that the seeing happens.
After the first son killed in the hunt
was buried with the elk’s horns on his cairn,
we tore the flesh of his death, hot from the fire.
VII
It can also be half said half truly.
But remember of what is half said,
that it must be twice heard: once
in the words of the saying, and again
in the burial and feast between two bloods.
I am, for plainness, a tribesman speaking
to other councils. “See what a land of plenty
we war in,” I say, “Let us possess our difference
and hunt our need in peace, to die as that first son
at whose grave we wintered; not in these games of
stones.”
And there you sit in your feathers and absolutes,
pointing your finger and arm. Do I see three heads
thrown back? Well then, the pow-wow is ended.
Your people are not mine. And yet, whoever
wins this war must hunt the elk or starve.
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