Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
               No symbolism, please.

The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
                In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
                 Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

The cat sits on the back of the sofa looking
out the window through the softly falling snow
at the last bit of gray light.

I can’t say the sun is going down.
We haven’t seen the sun for two months.
Who cares?
I am sitting in the blue chair listening to this stillness.
The only sound: the occasional gurgle of tea
coming out of the pot and into the cup.

How can this be?
Such calm, such peace, such solitude
in this world of woe.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House supports itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter—
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life—
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness—then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.
He knows the owls will guard the sweetness
of the soul in their massive keep of silence,
looking out with eyes open or closed over 
the length of Tomales Bay that the herons
conform to, whitely broad in flight, white
and slim in standing. God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the crickets 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.

It hovers in dark corners
         before the lights are turned on,
          it shakes sleep from its eyes
                and drops from mushroom gills,
                     it explodes in the starry heads 
                of dandelions turned sages,
                                      it sticks to the wings of green angels
                                 that sail from the tops of maples.

          It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
                       it lives in each earthworm segment
                                                       surviving cruelty,
              it is the motion that runs
                            from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
                                         it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
                                       of the child that has just been born.

                                                  It is the singular gift
      we cannot destroy in ourselves,
      the argument that refutes death,
        the genius that invents the future,
                                                all we know of God.

            It is the serum which makes us swear
                                               not to betray one another;
   it is this poem, trying to speak.

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovely planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

Because of the menace
your father opened
like a black umbrella
and held high
over your childhood blocking the light,
your life now seems

to you exceptional
in its simplicities.
You speak of this,
throwing the window open
on a plain spring day,
dazzling
after such a winter.

Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Criss-crossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we’ll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the
      hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go, but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,
    the love, --
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and
     curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
      approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in
       the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will 
not keep on for days at a time, it will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly—better to leave it as it is.

Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their pile of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
leaning in the doorway, talking to you
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself
               together
for some clear “meaning”—some momentary summary?
                no one
can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day,
               the ordinary
blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the
               health sometimes,
only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long
               long tumultuous stretches;
look what that intensity did to poor great Van Gogh!;
               linger, lunge,
scrounge and be stupid, that doesn’t take much centering
                of one’s forces;
as wise Whitman said “lounge and invite the soul.” Get
                enough sleep;
and not only because (as Cocteau said) “poetry is the
                 literature of sleep”;
be a dumb bell for a few minutes at least; we don’t want
                  Sunday church bells
                  ringing constantly.

I learned two things
from an early riding teacher.
He held a nervous filly
in one hand and gestured
with the other, saying “Listen.
Keep one leg on one side,
the other leg on the other side,
and your mind in the middle.”

He turned and mounted.
She took two steps, then left
the ground, I thought for good.
But she came down hard, humped
her back, swallowed her neck,
and threw her rider as you’d
throw a rock. He rose, brushed
his pants and caught his breath,
and said, “See that’s the way 
to do it. When you see
they’re gonna throw you, get off.”