I want now to read one last poem to you and it's a--
like taking the leaves, poem and sections, several points.
And it's a poem that bears relation
to the one I just read or written earlier.
This is an attempt to go further in a way, but only an idea.
There are many other things in this poem
besides notions of time that I'm working with there.
This is a poem called Stone Walls,
and it's the poem of coming back as much as anything is.
A poem in six parts, I think it is.
Stone walls emerge from leafy ground and show their bones.
In September, a leaf fall singly down,
then 1,000 leaves whirl in frosty air.
I am wild with joy of leaves falling,
of stone walls emerging.
A return to the countryside where I lay as a boy
in the valley of noon heat in the village
of little sounds, where I floated out
of myself into the world that lives in the air.
In October, the leaves turn on low hills and middle distance
like heather, like tweed, like a tweed
roven from heather and gorse.
Purples, greens, reds, grays, oranges weaving together
this joyful fabric.
And I walked in the afternoon sun, kicking the leaves.
In November, the brightness washes from the hills.
And I love the land most leaves down, color drained out
in November rain.
Everything gray and brown against the dark evergreen.
Everything rock and silver lichen and moss on stone,
strong bones of stone walls showing
at last in November cold, making wavy rectangles
on the unperishing hills.
Part two.
Wesley wells was my grandfather's name.
He had high cheekbones and laughed
as he hoed, practicing stories.
The first time I remember him, it was summer at twilight.
He was weak from flu and couldn't hike for his cows
on ragged mountain.
He carried the old chair with no back
that he used for milking to the hillside over the house
and called that mountain Kibosh, kibosh, kibosh, kibosh, kibosh,
kibosh.
While he milked, he told about drummers and baseball.
He recited Lyceum poems about drunk deacons
or about lawyer Green, whose skin was the color, green,
Ridiculed as a schoolboy who left town and returned
triumphant.
And riding home from the hay fields, he handed me the pass.
How he walked down a row of fence posts
in the blizzard of '88 or sword oblongs of ice from Eagle pond.
Or in summer, drove the hay rack into shallow water,
swelling wooden wheels tight inside iron rims.
Or chatted and teased outside Amos Johnson's
with Buffalo Billy Fiske who dressed like a cowboy.
While I daydreamed my school year life
at spring Glen grammar school or Hampden High,
I longed to return to him in his awkward coat and cap,
in his sweater with many holes.
Three.
A century ago, these hills were bare.
You could see past eagle pond to sheep in the far pasture.
Walls crossing clear land, keeping Canesten lambs
from peasly potatoes.
Today, I walk in fields grown over,
among bare birches, oak saplings, enormous sugar
maples gone into themselves for winter.
Beside granite that men stacked for $0.25 a rod plus
forage for oxen.
Boulders sledded into place.
Smaller stones fitted by clever hands
to lock together like the arched ramparts of Mycenae.
I come to the foundations of an abandoned mill.
At the two sides of a trout stream,
feel stone walls emerging uncut and unmortared,
rear like a lion gate.
Emptiness over the still rushing water.
Four.
In this part, you will notice some politics
that are out of date as I knew they would be shortly
when I wrote them.
Though perhaps, not quite so shortly.
Part four.
Allende's murderers follow Orlando Letelier to Washington.
His car explodes when they push the lever.
His scream is distant, like the grocer's scream,
stabbed in the holdup.
These howls and Tsvetayeva's and Yelabuga who hangs herself
in her cottage, pulse, reverberate
and die in the scrub pine that grows from granite ledges,
visible against snow at the top of Kearsarge.
Because jamming plates drove the Appalachian range
through the Earth's crust before men and women,
before squirrels, before spruce and daisies,
when only amoebas wept to divide from themselves.
Stone dwindled under millennial rain like snow banks in March
and diminished under glaciers under the eyes of mice
and reindeer, under the eyes of foxes,
under Siberian eyes tracking bear
10,000 years ago on Kearsarge.
And the Shah of Iran's opponents wake
to discover nails driven through their kneecaps.
When Pinochet frowns in Chile, hearing these howls,
the corners of his mouth twitch with an uncontrollable grin.
Tiberius, listening, grins.
Each morning, we watch stone walls
emerge on Kearsarge and on Ragged Mountain.
I love these mountains which do not change.
The screams persist.
I continue my life.
Five.
At Thornley store, the dead mingle with the living.
Benjamin Canesten hovers with Wesley among hardware.
Kate looks over spools of thread with nanny
and old shadows stand among dowels and raisins, woolen
socks and axes.
Now Ansel stops to buy salt and tells Bob Thornley
it got so cold, he saw two hound dogs put jumper cables
on a jackrabbit.
Skiers stopped for gas.
Summer people join us.
Hitchhikers, road workers, machinists, farmers,
saw sharpeners.
Our cries and hungers, stories and music
reverberate on the hills and stone walls on the Exxon sign
and clapboard of Thornley store.
Part 6 is the last part.
At church, we eat squares of bread.
We commune with mothers and cousins
with mothering, fathering hills, with dead and living.
And go home in gray December in advent,
waiting among generations unborn who will look at the same hills
as the leaves fall and turn gray and watch stone walls
ascending Ragged Mountain.
These walls are the bones of presidents, men and women
who were never born, who will never lead the Republic
into the valley of cattle.
When gangs fight with dogs for the moose's body
and poems for Letelier are scattered
like the molecules of his body, and the books
are burnt, and this room wet ashes and language burnt out
and the dead departed along with the living.
Wavering stone lines will emerge from leaves in November
on mountains without names.
Pole beans raise their green flags in the summer garden.
I grow old in the house I wanted to grow old in.
When I am sleepy at night, I daydream only
of waking the next morning to walk
on the Earth of the present, past noons of birch and sugar
bush, past cellar holes many miles
to the village of nightfall.
Thank you.
Thank you
[APPLAUSE]