Classic Poem

I'm happiest sawing wood, I guess,
balanced there over the cut — as much
pull as push — as the blood goes —
from the heart, then toward it —
or the breath goes, or a fiddle bow.
We're at home somehow
where a balance is.

So much is out of reach:

The banties going to roost
in the lilac and apple branches,
the last light high up the hill,
the blue-grey and gold slow
soundless catastrophes of the clouds,
crows flying eastward,
the heart's desire ... the mind's dominion ...

What a relief
to speak what can hurt nobody:
" Crows from the north came early. . . . "
implying nothing, only
a hard winter and a difference
in crows (the winter ones
soaring more, cawing in flight more,
like ravens); and, to a sawyer, per-
haps that the years also
are sawed — into lengths and seasons
by a ragged alternation of black-
quilled rakers and cutters, rasping
to and fro, north and south.

Push and pull push and pull,
half a yard only, my own
alternation goes. No talent's
required, only standing in one place. How much
more should one ask, though,
when whatever's gone is gone
and what is to come or not come nothing
can reach, and what we have
we have only on balance?











By permission of the author.