Four Poems

From Sabbaths 2011

I.

for David Garrard Lowe

Matisse’s Dominique of Vence*
on a postcard from a friend
stands in my window, a presence
in the light, below a bend

of the Kentucky River.
His face is featureless,
yet he stands in character,
a book displaying a cross

held against his heart
by a hand in bare outline,
remade entirely by art.
The falling folds of his gown

are several vertical strokes
signifying to the eye
in black lines quick as looks.
The saint is standing by

in silence while the light
performs its holy work
in colors on the white
wall. After the dark

it is morning in Vence.
Many years ago
I went there, and ever since
have recalled the light, now

replaced by later light,
how it filled the room,
crowding the darkness out,
allowing vision its time.

Behind the pictured saint,
meanwhile, my washed window
is a grid in black paint
rationally ruled, although

admitting sensational light. Beyond
are trees, the river, a dark line of hills,
familiar as hand to mind,
but the prospect fills

no term of human truth,
no form of human thought.
A heron hunched at stream mouth
fishes quietly as he ought.

* A figure in outline of St. Dominique, one of Matisse’s “decorations” for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence,
a hill town in southern France. The Chapel was consecrated on June 25, 1951. I went there in 1962.

VIII.

Off in the woods in the quiet
morning a redbird is singing
and his song goes out around him
greater than its purpose,
a welcoming room of song
in which the trees stand,
through which the creek flows.

XI.

New come, we took fields
from the forest, clearing, breaking
the steep slopes. And this was
a fall from a kind of grace:
from the forest in its long Sabbath,
dependent only upon
the Genius of this place, to the field
dependent upon us, our work,
and our failure first and last
to keep peace between
the naked soil and the rain.
From the laws of the First Former
we fell to the place deformed.
The hard rains fell then
into our history, from grace
to fate upon our gullied land.

We numbered the years, not many,
until the forest took back
the failed fields with their scars
unhealed and long in healing,
our toil forfeit to the trees
of a new generation: locust,
cedar, box elder, elm,
and thorn. In spring the redbud
and wild plum, white and pink
on the abandoned slopes, granted
such beauty as we might
have thought forgiving.

By leaving it alone, we are
in a manner forgiven. And yet
we must wait long, long—
how much longer than we
will live?—for the return of what
is gone, not of the past
forever lost, but of health,
the promise of life in and
remade finally whole.

Left alone, the “pioneer
generation” of trees gives way
to the oaks, hickories, maples,
beeches, poplars of the lasting
forest.

             By keeping intact
its gift of self-renewal, not
as our belonging, but asking how
we might belong to it,
what we might use of it
for ourselves, leaving it whole,
we may come to live in its
time, in which our lives will pass
as pass the lives of birds
within the lives of trees.

XIII.

Will-lessly the leaves fall,
are blown, coming at last
to the ground and to their rest.
Among them in their coming down
purposely the birds pass,
of all the unnumbered ways
choosing one, until
they like the leaves will
will-lessly fall. Thus freed
by gravity, every one
enters the soil, conformed
to the craft and wisdom, the behest
of God’s appointed vicar,
our mother and judge, who binds
us each to each, the largest
to the least, in the family of all
the creatures: great Nature
by whom all are changed, none
are wasted, none are lost.
Supreme artist of this
our present world, her works
live and move, love
their places and their lives in them.
And this is praise to the highest
knowledge by the most low.