Poems About Place
Evensong
In late afternoon, when the light
no longer has a source, but is brushed
like a glowing powder onto leaves
and housefronts, a cock cardinal
in the sconce of a dead treetop
flickers like a wick, and calls his hen
to roost. Or simply calls.
On a wire spanning my lawn
from maples to blue spruce, a dove
repeats its slow broken sound
for some minutes of this world,
then leaves it. One by one
the bright dusts wear off. Trees
and sky enlarge toward one another,
mass into one shadow.
The ardor of this world looked at
in the moving meaninglessness
of light and of the lives
that sing to it, and leave,
is, finally, the grace there is
Home is so Sad
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Living at the Frost Place
The day my daughter leaves for California,
I'm three hundred miles north
in the Franconia, New Hampshire farmhouse
where Robert Frost lived with his wife
and four young children. I don't call
to tell her to pack vitamins and sunblock,
I don't ask what airline or what flight she's on.
She's old enough to make her way
from one end of the continent to another.
I spend the morning writing
at my makeshift summer desk on the verandah,
Mount Lafayette a hazy blue reminder
of the obstacles that pierce the sky at intervals
from here to the Sierras. The Morris chair
Frost sat in when he wrote the great poems
of his middle years stands brooding
in the parlor, flanked by manuscripts
and letters in glass cases—stern reminders
that I've reached the point in life where work
must come before the fretful agitations of a parent.
I take the silkscreened print she made me
for my birthday—an abstract latticework
in red and black like the synapses, or the mysteries
of blood—down from the mantel and replace it
with a photo of the poet on the peak of Lafayette
surrounded by his children: disapproving
Lesley; Marjorie, who died of complications
following childbirth; Carol, melancholy boy
who shot himself; Irma, terrified
of men, who went insane.
The Edge of the World
I light the lamp and look at my watch.
Four-thirty. Tap out my shoes
because of the scorpions, and go out
into the field. Such a sweet night.
No moon, but urgent stars. Go back inside
and make hot chocolate on my butane burner.
I search around with the radio through
the skirl of the Levant. "Tea for Two"
in German. Finally, Cleveland playing
the Rams in the rain. It makes me feel
acutely here and everybody somewhere else.
Creation Myth
This is a story handed down.
It is about the old days when Bill
and Florence and a lot of their kin
lived in the little tin-roofed house
beside the woods, below the hill.
Mornings, they went up the hill
to work, Florence to the house,
the men and boys to the field.
Evenings, they all came home again.
There would be talk then and laughter
and taking of ease around the porch
while the summer night closed.
But one night, McKinley, Bill's young brother,
stayed away late, and it was dark
when he started down the hill.
Not a star shone, not a window.
What he was going down into was
the dark, only his footsteps sounding
to prove he trod the ground. And Bill
who had got up to cool himself,
thinking and smoking, leaning on
the jamb of the open front door,
heard McKinley coming down,
and heard his steps beat faster
as he came, for McKinley felt the pasture's
darkness joined to all the rest
of darkness everywhere. It touched
the depths of the woods and sky and grave.
In that huge dark, things that usually
stayed put might get around, as fish
in pond or slue get loose in flood.
Oh, things could be coming close
that never had come close before.
He missed the house and went on down
and crossed the draw and pounded on
where the pasture widened on the other side,
lost then for sure. Propped in the door,
Bill heard him circling, a dark star
in the dark, breathing hard, his feet
blind on the little reality
that was left. Amused, Bill smoked
his smoke, and listened. He knew where
McKinley was, though McKinley didn't.
Bill smiled in the darkness to himself,
and let McKinley run until his steps
approached something really to fear:
the quarry pool. Bill quit his pipe
then, opened the screen, and stepped out,
barefoot, on the warm boards. “McKinley!”
he said, and laid the field out clear
under McKinley's feet, and placed
the map of it in his head.
November Surf
Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are drawn
Like smoking mountains bright from the west
And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness: then suddenly
The old granite forgets half a year's filth:
The orange-peel, eggshells, papers, pieces of clothing, the clots
Of dung in corners of the rock, and used
Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all the droppings of the summer
Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:
I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then...But all seasons
The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long coast
Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous,
The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
the dignity of room, the value of rareness.
Potluck at the Wilmot Flat Baptist Church
[Note: This is the third section of a longer poem by Kenyon entitled "American Triptych"—Bill Peak]
We drive to the Flat on a clear November night. Stars and planets appear in the eastern sky, not yet in the west.
Voices rise from the social hall downstairs, the clink of silverware and plates, the smell of coffee.
As we walk into the room, faces turn to us, friendly and curious. We are seated at the speakers' table, next to the town historian, a retired schoolteacher who is lively and precise.
The table is decorated with red, white, and blue streamers, and framed Time and Newsweek covers of the President, just elected. Someone has tied peanuts to small branches with red, white, and blue yarn, and set the branches upright in lumps of clay at the center of each table.
After the meal, everyone clears food from the tables, and tables from the hall. Then we go up to the sanctuary, where my husband reads poems from the pulpit.
One woman looks out the window continually. I notice the altar cloth, tasseled and embroidered in gold thread: Till I Come. There is applause after each poem.
On the way home we pass the white clapboard faces of the library and town hall, luminous in the moonlight, and I remember the first time I ever voted—in a township hall in Michigan.
That same wonderful smell of coffee was in the air, and I found myself among people trying to live ordered lives...And again I am struck with love for the Republic.