Watch with Me
The Wild Birds
A World Lost
POETRY
The Broken Ground
Clearing
Collected Poems: 1957 - 1982
The Country of Marriage
Entries
Farming: A Hand Book
Findings
Openings
A Part
Sabbaths
Sayings and Doings
A Timbered Choir
Traveling at Home (with prose)
The Wheel
ESSAYS
Another Turn of the Crank
A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Hidden Wound
Home Economics
Recollected Essays: 1954 - 1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Standing by Words
The Unforeseen Wilderness
The Unsettling of America
What Are People For?
For Jack Shoemaker
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I like the idea of a volume of “selected poems” because I like the ideas of culling and condensation and compactness. In making this book, I have culled a lot of poems and thus have achieved some condensation as a matter of course. I might have achieved compactness as well, if I had had the foresight and the good luck to write shorter poems. Having so often failed at brevity, and needing to represent my work at least adequately, I have had to sacrifice compactness in the interest of fairness to myself.
This selection contains none of the poems recently collected in A Timbered Choir. To have included work from that book would have made this one too large, and would have introduced the problem of representing adequately a distinct body of work.
W. B.
In a time that breaks in cutting pieces all around, when men, voiceless against thing-ridden men, set themselves on fire, it seems too difficult and rare to think of the life of a man grown whole in the world, at peace and in place. But having thought of it I am beyond the time I might have sold my hands or sold my voice and mind to the arguments of power that go blind against what they would destroy.
from The Broken Ground
THE APPLE TREE
for Ann and Dick O’Hanlon
In the essential prose
of things, the apple tree
stands up, emphatic
among the accidents
of the afternoon, solvent,
not to be denied.
The grass has been cut
down, carefully
to leave the orange
poppies still in bloom;
the tree stands up
in the odor of the grass
drying. The forked
trunk and branches are
also a kind of necessary
prose—shingled with leaves,
pigment and song
imposed on the blunt
lineaments of fact, a foliage
of small birds among them.
The tree lifts itself up
in the garden, the
clutter of its green
leaves halving the light,
stating the unalterable
congruity and form
of its casual growth;
the crimson finches appear
and disappear, singing
among the design.
THE WILD
In the empty lot—a place
not natural, but wild—among
the trash of human absence,
the slough and shamble
of the city’s seasons, a few
old locusts bloom.
A few woods birds
fly and sing
in the new foliage
—warblers and tanagers, birds
wild as leaves; in a million
each one would be rare,
new to the eyes. A man
couldn’t make a habit
of such color,
such flight and singing.
But they are the habit of this
wasted place. In them
the ground is wise. They are
its remembrance of what it is.
THE PLAN
My old friend, the owner
of a new boat, stops by
to ask me to fish with him,
and I say I will—both of us
knowing that we may never
get around to it, it may be
years before we’re both
idle again on the same day.
But we make a plan, anyhow,
in honor of friendship
and the fine spring weather
and the new boat
and our sudden thought
of the water shining
under the morning fog.
THE BROKEN GROUND
The opening out and out,
body