The foliage has dropped
below the window’s grave edge,
baring the sky, the distant
hills, the branches,
the year’s greenness
gone down from the high
light where it so fairly
defied falling.
The country opens to the sky,
the eye purified among hard facts:
the black grid of the window,
the wood of trees branching
outward and outward
to the nervousness of twigs,
buds asleep in the air.
The sycamore gathers
out of the sky, white
in the glance that looks up to it
through the black crisscross
of the window. But it is not a glance
that it offers itself to.
It is no lightning stroke
caught in the eye. It stays,
an old holding in place.
And its white is not so pure
as a glance would have it,
but emerges partially,
the tree’s renewal of itself
among the mottled browns
and olives of the old bark.
Its dazzling comes into the sun
a little at a time
as though a god in it
is slowly revealing himself.
How often the man of the window
has studied its motley trunk,
the out-starting of its branches,
its smooth crotches,
its revelations of whiteness,
hoping to see beyond his glances
the distorting geometry
of preconception and habit,
to know it beyond words.
All he has learned of it
does not add up to it.
There is a bird who nests in it
in the summer and seems to sing of it
the quick lights among its leaves
-better than he can
It is not by his imagining
its whiteness comes.
The earth is greater than man.
To speak of it the mind must bend.
His mind gone from the window
into dark thought, suddenly
a flash of water
lights in the corner of his eye:
the kingfisher is rising,
laden, out of his plunge,
the water still subsiding
under the bare willow.
The window becomes a part
of his mind’s history, the entrance
of days into it. And awake
now, watching the water flow
beyond the glass, his mind
is watched by a spectre of itself
that is a window on the past.
Life steadily accumulating
its subtractions, it has fallen
to him to remember
an old man who, dying,
dreamed of his garden,
a harvest so bountiful
he couldn’t carry it home
—another who saw
in the flaws of the moon
a woman’s face
like a cameo.
The window grows fragile
in a time of war.
The man seated beneath it
feels its glass turn deadly.
He feels the nakedness
of his face and throat.
Its shards and splinters balance
in transparence, delicately
seamed. In the violence
of men against men, it will not last.
In any mind turned away
in hate, it will go blind.
Men spare one another
by compact. When there is hate
it is joyous to kill. And he
has borne the hunger to destroy,
riding anger like a captain,
savage, exhalted and blind.
There is war in his veins
like a loud song.
He has known his heart to rise
in glad holocaust against his kind,
and felt hard in thigh and arm
the thew of fury.
Peace. May he waken
not too late from his wraths
to find his window still
clear in its wall, and the world
there. Within things
there is peace, and at the end
of things. It is the mind
turned away from the world
that turns against it.
The armed Presidents stand
on deadly islands in the air,
overshadowing the crops.
Peace. Let men, who cannot be brothers
to themselves, be brothers
to mulleins and daisies
that have learned to live on the earth.
Let them understand the pride
of sycamores and thrushes
that receive the light gladly, and do not
think to illuminate themselves.
Let them know that the foxes and the owls
are joyous in their lives,
and their gayety is praise to the heavens,
and they do not raven with their minds.
In the night the devourer,
and in the morning all things
find the light a comfort.
Peace. The earth turns
against all living, in the end.
And when mind has not outraged
itself against its nature,
they die and become the place
they lived in. Peace to the bones
that walk in the sun toward death,
for they will come to it soon enough.
Let the phoebes return in spring
and build their nest of moss
in the porch rafters,
and in autumn let them depart.
Let the garden be planted,
and let the frost come.
Peace to the porch and the garden.
Peace to the man in the window.
In the early morning dark
he dreamed of the spring woodsflowers
standing in the ground,
dark yet under the leaves and under
the bare cold branches.
But in his dream he knew their way
was prepared, and in their time
they would rise up joyful.
And though he had dreamed earlier
of strife, his sleep became peaceful.
He said: If man, who has killed
his brothers and hated himself,
is made in the image of God,
then surely the bloodroot,
wild phlox, trillium and May apple
are more truly made
in God’s image, for they have desired
to be no more than they are,
and they have spared each other.
Their future
is undiminished by their past.
Let me, he said in his dream,
become always less a soldier
and more a man,
for what is unopened in the ground
is pledged to peace.
When he woke and went out
a flock of wild ducks that had fed
on the river while he slept
flew off in fear of him.
And he walked, manly, into the new day.
He came to his window
where he sat and looked out,
the earth before him, blessed
by his dream of peace,
bad history behind him.
He has known a tunnel
through the falling snow
that brought him back at dark
and nearly killed him on the way,
the road white as the sky
and the snow piling.
Mortality crept close
in the darkness round his eyes.
He felt his death’s wrenched avatars
lying like silent animals
along the ditch. He thought
of his wife, his supper and his bed,
and kept on, and made it.
Now he sits at the window
again, the country hard and bright
in this winter’s coldest morning.
The river, unfrozen still,
gives off a breath of smoke
that flows upstream with the wind.
Behind him that burrow
along the wild road
grows certain in his mind,
leading here, surely. It has arrived
at the window, and is clarified.
Now he has learned another way
he can come here. Luck
taught him, and desire.
The snow lies under the woods
and February is ending.
Far off, another way, he hears
the flute of spring,
an old-style traveler,
wandering through the trees.
In the heron’s eye
is one of the dies of change.
Another
is in the sun.
Each thing is carried
beyond itself.
The man of the window
lives at the edge,
knowing the approach
of what must be, joy
and dread.
Now the old sycamore
yields at its crown
a dead branch.
It will sink like evening
into its standing place.
The young trees rise,
and the dew is on them,
and the heat of the day
is on them, and the dark
-end and beginning
without end.
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