A New Selected Poems

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

FROM What a Kingdom It Was: 1960

First Song

For William Carlos Williams

Freedom, New Hampshire

The Supper After the Last

The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World

FROM Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock: 1964

The River That Is East

For Robert Frost

Poem of Night

Middle of the Way

Ruins Under the Stars

Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock

FROM Body Rags: 1968

Another Night in the Ruins

Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond

The Burn

The Fly

The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

How Many Nights

The Porcupine

The Bear

FROM The Book of Nightmares: 1971

Under the Maud Moon

The Hen Flower

The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible

Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight

Lastness

FROM Mortal Acts, Mortal Words: 1980

Fergus Falling

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Saint Francis and the Sow

Wait

Daybreak

Blackberry Eating

Kissing the Toad

On the Tennis Court at Night

The Last Hiding Places of Snow

Looking at Your Face

Fisherman

52 Oswald Street

A Milk Bottle

FROM The Past: 1985

The Road Between Here and There

Conception

The Sow Piglet’s Escapes

The Olive Wood Fire

The Frog Pond

Prayer

Fire in Luna Park

Cemetery Angels

On the Oregon Coast

First Day of the Future

The Fundamental Project of Technology

The Waking

That Silent Evening

FROM When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone: 1990

The Tragedy of Bricks

The Cat

Oatmeal

The Perch

The Room

Last Gods

Farewell

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

FROM Imperfect Thirst: 1994

My Mother’s R & R

The Man in the Chair

The Cellist

Running on Silk

The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson

Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West

Sheffield Ghazal 5: Passing the Cemetery

Parkinson’s Disease

Rapture

Flies

Neverland

About the Author

First Mariner Books edition 2001

Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Galway Kinnell

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Kinnell, Galway, date.

[Poems. Selections]

A new selected poetry / Galway Kinnell.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-618-02187-6

ISBN 0-618-15445-0 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3521.1582 A6 2000

811'.54—dc21 99-048904

eISBN 978-0-547-52449-8

v3.0615

The eight poems from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, copyright © 1990 by Galway Kinnell, are reprinted by kind permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

To EPHRAIM and MIRAH

O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she,

In which that love upgroweth with youre age

          . . . thynketh al nys but a faire

This world, that passeth soone as floures faire.

—Chaucer

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In this paperback edition of A New Selected Poems, I have taken out three poems, all from early books, that were included in the hardcover edition, and added eight others, mostly from later books. This edition also incorporates revisions that were not present in the hardcover book. For many years, I have felt exasperated by my intractable habit of working at certain poems again and again, over long spans of time. But in recent years I have come to accept that, at least in the case of a complex project, this is simply how I write. It makes me think of the digestive process of a Methuselah-ian ruminant animal, one with many many stomachs, that chews its cud for decades (though I don’t want to carry this analogy to its logical alimentary end). From the outside, it may seem only that a given poem has been belatedly revised, while to me, making these changes was still part of the process of composition, a final stage in the protracted struggle with my very sullen art.

I would like to thank my peerless editor, Pat Strachan; Janet Silver, editor in chief; and Wendy Strothman, executive vice president, all of Houghton Mifflin, for understanding how necessary these reworkings are to me in my effort to bring the poems into their final form.

FROM

What a Kingdom It Was

1960

First Song

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy

After an afternoon of carting dung

Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing

Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall

And he began to hear the pond frogs all

Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy

Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall

Of Illinois, and from the fields two small

Boys came bearing cornstalk violins

And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins

And the three sat there scraping of their joy.

It was now fine music the frogs and the boys

Did in the towering Illinois twilight make

And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache

A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk

The first song of his happiness, and the song woke

His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

For William Carlos Williams

When you came and you talked and you read with your

Private zest from the varicose marble

Of the podium, the lovers of literature

Paid you the tribute of their almost total

Inattention, although someone when you spoke of a pig

Did squirm, and it is only fair to report another gig-

gled. But you didn’t even care. You seemed

Above remarking we were not your friends.

You hung around inside the rimmed

Circles of your heavy glasses and smiled and

So passed a lonely evening. In an hour

Of talking your honesty built you a tower.

When it was over and you sat down and the chair-

man got up and smiled and congratulated

You and shook your hand, I watched a professor

In neat bow tie and enormous tweeds, who patted

A faint praise of the sufficiently damned,

Drained spittle from his pipe, then scrammed.

Freedom, New Hampshire

1

We came to visit the cow

Dying of fever,

Towle said it was already

Shoveled under, in a secret

Burial-place in the woods.

We prowled through the woods

Weeks, we never

Found where. Other

Children other summers

Must have found the place

And asked, Why is it

Green here? The rich

Guess a grave, maybe,

The poor think a pit

For dung, like the one

We shoveled in in the fall,

That came up a brighter green

The next year, that

Could as well have been

The grave of a cow

Or something, for all that shows.

2

We found a cowskull once; we thought it was

From one of the asses in the Bible, for the sun

Shone into the holes through which it had seen

Earth as an endless belt carrying gravel, had heard

Its truculence cursed, had learned how human sweat

Stinks, and had brayed—shone into the holes

With solemn and majestic light, as if some

Skull somewhere could be Baalbek or the Parthenon.

That night passing Towle’s Barn

We saw lights. Towle had lassoed a calf

By its hind legs, and he tugged against the grip

Of the darkness. The cow stood by, chewing millet.

Derry and I took hold, too, and hauled.

It was sopping with darkness when it came free.

It was a bullcalf. The cow mopped it awhile,

And we walked around it with a lantern,

And it was sunburned, somehow, and beautiful.

It took a teat as the first business

And sneezed and drank at the milk of light.

When we got it balanced on its legs, it went wobbling

Toward the night. Walking home in darkness

We saw the July moon looking on Freedom, New Hampshire,

We smelled the fall in the air, it was the summer,

We thought, Oh this is but the summer!

3

Once I saw the moon

Drift into the sky like a bright

Pregnancy pared

From a goddess who had to

Keep slender to remain beautiful—

Cut loose, and drifting up there

To happen by itself—

And waning, in lost labor;

As we lost our labor

Too—afternoons

When we sat on the gate

By the pasture, under the Ledge,

Buzzing and skirling on toilet-

papered combs tunes

To the rumble-seated cars

Taking the Ossipee Road

On Sundays; for

Though dusk would come upon us

Where we sat, and though we had

Skirled out our hearts in the music,

Yet the not-yet dandruffed

Harps we skirled it on

Had done not much better than

Flies, which buzzed, when quick

We trapped them in our hands,

Which went