Ask Me (Stories That Could Be True, 1977)

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

 

The Farm on the Great Plains (Stories That Could Be True, 1977)

A telephone line goes cold;
birds tread it wherever it goes.
A farm back of a great plain
tugs an end of the line.

I call that farm every year,
ringing it, listening, still;
no one is home at the farm,
the line gives only a hum.

Some year I will ring the line
on a night at last the right one,
and with an eye tapered for braille
from the phone on the wall

I will see the tenant who waits --
the last one left at the place;
through the dark my braille eye
will lovingly touch his face.

"Hello, is Mother at home?"
No one is home today.
"But Father -- he should be there."
No one -- no one is here.

"But you -- are you the one . . . ?"
Then the line will be gone
because both ends will be home:
no space, no birds, no farm.

My self will be the plain,
wise as winter is gray,
pure as cold posts go
pacing toward what I know.

Thinking For Berky

The Way It Was Then (A Scripture Of Leaves, 1989)

Aunt Mabel used to say,
"Hands are for giving."
She gave away all she had
while she was living.

She drove an old Dodge
that wouldn't shift into reverse,
and she had to swing it outward
when she went to church.

The most vulnerable person
in all our town-
her belief and her love
combined into one;

So everyone cheated her.
And when she died
I saw strange people sneak
to her graveside

And cry quietly-afraid of the law
but come back to visit
Aunt Mabel once more.

When I go back there now
I still see her store:
"Hay, Grain, Feed, and Seed,"
an old dog by the door.

Such a long time ago-
what is there left
for us to remember
of Aunt Mabel's gift?-

The flowers on her hat,
the old car she drove,
the smell of the hay,
her voice: "God is love."

 

Sometimes (A Scripture of Leaves, 1989)

It could be you move through a crowd and your arm
touches a new kingdom. Surrounded,
you shake off a self and become everything
else. It is moving that brings this bonus,
or something about your arm, how you raise it
and become a whole nation, more than a person
lost among others. A few times I've felt this.

You balance, you turn, and out there around you
loom parts of a life you can become.
Everyone is a dancer; your plod gathers in
the sunset and all the separate lights coming on
as you turn. There's a music. Someone has adjusted
what was only a noise. Some people say it
this way: "I'm born again."

 

Stories To Live In The World With (Someday Maybe, 1973)

A long rope of gray smoke was
coming out of the ground. I went
nearer and looked at it sideways.
I think there was a cave, and some people
were in a room by a fire in the earth.
One of them thought of a person like me
coming near but never quite coming in
to know them.

Once a man killed another, to rob him,
but found nothing, except that lying
there by a rock was a very sharp,
glittering little knife. The murderer
took the knife home and put it beside
his bed, and in the night he woke
and the knife was gone. But there was
no way for a person to get in to take the knife.

The man went to a wise old woman.
When she heard the story, she began to laugh.
The man got mad. He yelled at the woman
to tell why she was laughing. She looked
at him carefully with her eyes squinted
as if she looked at the sun. "Can't you
guess what happened?" she asked.

The man didn't want to be dumb, so
he thought and thought. "Maybe the knife
was so sharp that it fell on the ground
and just cut its way deeper and deeper and
got away." The woman squinted some more.
She shook her head. "You learned that from
a story. No, I will tell you why you
thought the knife was gone and why
you came here to ask me about it:
you are dead."

Then the man noticed that he didn't
have any shadow. He went out and
looked around: nothing had any shadow.
He began to squint up his eyes, it was
all so bright. And wherever he looked
there were sharp little knives.

This is a true story. He really was dead.
My mother told us about it. She told us
never to kill or rob.
At a little pond in the woods
I decided: this is the center of my life.
I threw a big stick far out, to be
all the burdens from earlier years.
Ever since, I have been walking
lightly, looking around, out of the woods.

 

Listening (A Scripture of Leaves, 1989)

My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.

 

Purifying the Language of the Tribe (An Oregon Message, 1987)

Walking away means
"Goodbye."

Pointing a knife at your stomach means
"Please don't say that again."

Leaning toward you means
"I love you."

Raising a finger means
"I enthusiastically agree."

"Maybe" means
"No."

"Yes" means
"Maybe."

Looking like this at you means
"You had your chance."

 

A Ritual To Read To Each Other (A Scripture of Leaves, 1989)

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider-
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

 

Earth Dweller (Allegiances, 1970)

It was all the clods at once become
precious; it was the barn, and the shed,
and the windmill, my hands, the crack
Arlie made in the ax handle: oh, let me stay
here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;
let the sun casually rise and set.
If I have not found the right place,
teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are
vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing
for the saints forever, the shed and windmill
rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

Now I know why people worship, carry around
magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.

 

Level Light (Stories That Could Be True, 1977)

Sometimes the light when evening fails
stains all haystacked country and hills,
runs the cornrows and clasps the barn
with that kind of color escaped from corn
that brings to autumn the winter word-
a level shaft that tells the world:

It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find them-fail.

In one stride night then takes the hill.

 

Brother Wind (Brother Wind, 1986)

Air this morning embraces you, cool
from the canyon. You let go of earth
and wander treetops, fall upward,
tumble along free into space. Often
around corners you die and wait and get
warm, then wander forth again. Who knows
where you'll stay tonight? Horse-trading through
Wyoming, sage-nuzzling, canyon-whistling,
you campaign onward. Did you hear
the one about the kite from Texas? And they
say there's a cave where captive air has whispered
for centuries-you go there and listen
and learn the language rocks use
when nobody is around. When you come
back, everybody else is too loud, and every
morning you have to go out near dawn
even for only a minute, to lean over and hear
that patient sound, following again the cool
corridors through canyons that always go down.