I. The Conversation
Speaker and hearer, words
making a passage between them,
begin a community. Two minds
in succession, grandfather
and grandson, they sit and talk
on the enclosed porch,
looking out at the town, which
takes its origin in their talk
and is carried forward.
Their conversation has
no pattern of its own,
but alludes casually
to a shaped knowledge
in the minds of the two men
who love each other.
The quietness of knowing in common
is half of it. Silences come into it
easily, and break it
while the old man thinks
or concentrates on his pipe
and the strong smoke
climbs over the brim of his hat.
He has lived a long time.
He has seen the changes of times
and grown used to the world
again. Having been wakeful so long,
the loser of so many years,
his mind moves back and forth,
sorting and counting,
among all he knows.
His memory has become huge,
and surrounds him,
and fills his silences.
He lifts his head
and speaks of an old day
that amuses him or grieves him
or both …
Under the windows opposite them
there’s a long table, loaded
with potted plants, the foliage
staining and shadowing the daylight
as it comes in.
II. The New House
At the foot of his long shadow
he walked across the town
early in the morning
to watch the carpenters at work
on a new house. Their saws released
the warm pine-smell into the air
—the scent of time to come, freshly
opened. He was comforted by that,
and by the new unblemished wood
That times goes, making
the jointures of households, for better
or worse, is no comfort.
That, for the men and women
still to be born, time is coming
is a comfort of sorts.
That there’s a little of the good
left over from a few lives
is a comfort of sorts.
He has grown eager
in his love for the good dead
and all the unborn.
That failed hope
doesn’t prove the failure of hope
is a comfort of sorts.
Grown old and wise, he takes
what comfort he can get, as gladly as once
he’d have taken the comfort he wished for.
For a man knowing evil—how surely
it grows up in any ground and makes seed—
the building of a house is a craft indeed.
III. The Heaviness of His Wisdom
The incredible happens, he knows.
The worst possibilities are real.
The terrible justifies
his dread of it. He knows winter
despondences, the mind inundated
by its excrement, hope gone
and not remembered.
And he knows vernal transfigurations,
the sentence in the stems of trees
noisy with old memory made new,
troubled with the seed
of the being of what has not been.
He trusts the changes of the sun and air:
dung and carrion made dirt,
richness that forgets what it was.
He knows, if he can hold out
long enough, the good
is given its chance.
he has dreamed of a town
fit for the abiding of souls
and bodies that might live forever.
He has seen it as in a far off
white and gold evening
of summer, the black flight
of swifts turning above it
in the air. There’s a clarity
in which he hasn’t become clear,
his body dragging a shadow,
half hidden in it.
IV. The Freedom of Loving
After his long wakeful life,
he has come to love the world
as though it’s not to be lost.
Though he faces darkness, his hands
have no weight or harshness
on his small granddaughters’ heads.
His love doesn’t ask that they understand
it includes them. It includes, as freely,
the green plant leaves in the window,
clusters of white ripe peaches weighting
the branch among the weightless leaves.
There was an agony in ripening.
which becomes irrelevant at last
to ripeness. His love
turned away from death, freely,
is equal to it.
V. The Fern
His intimate the green fern
lives in his eye, its profusion
veiling the earthen pot,
the leaves lighted and shadowed
among the actions of the morning.
Between the fern and the old man
there has been conversation
all their lives. The leaves
have spoken to his eyes.
He has replied with his hands.
In his handing it has come down
until now—a living
which has survived
all successions and sheddings.
Even when he was a boy
plants were his talent. His mother
would give him the weak ones
until he made them grow,
then buy them, healed, for dimes.
And from her he inherits
the fern, the life of it
on which the new leaves crest.
It feeds on the sun and the dirt
and does not hasten.
It has forgotten all deaths.
VI. He’s in the Habit of the World
The world has finally worn him
until he’s no longer strange to it.
His face has grown comfortable on him.
His hat is shaped to his way
of putting it on and taking it off,
the crown bordered
with the dark graph of his sweat.
He has become a scholar of plants
and gardens, the student
of his memory, attentive to pipesmoke
and the movements of shadows. His days
come to him as if they know him.
He has become one of the familiars
of the place, like a landmark
the birds no longer fear.
Among the greens of full summer,
among shadows like monuments,
he makes his way down,
loving the earth he will become.
VII. The Young Man, Thinking of the Old
While we talk we hear across the town
two hammers galloping on a roof, and the high
curving squeal of an electric saw.
That’s happening deep in the town’s being.
It’s as weighted and clumsy with its hope
as a pregnant woman or a loaded barge.
And the old man sitting beside me knows
the tools and vision of a builder
of houses, and the uses of those.
His strong marriage has made
the accuracy of his dwelling.
As though always speaking openly
in a clear room, he has made
the ways of neighborhood
between his house and the town.
His life has been a monument to the place.
His garden rows go back through all
his summers, bearing their fading
script of vine and bloom,
what he has written on the ground,
its kind abundance, taken kindly from it.
Now, resting from his walk,
he’s comforted by the sounds
of hammering, half listened to,
as his eyes rest in the greenness
of the fern, with attention
deeper than consciousness.
The strength of the living town
forces into the design of a house
—blindly, he knows,
as the life of a tree is forced
into a shell holding the seed
for a use or disaster not known.
He’s comforted, not because he hopes
for much, but because he knows
of hope, its losses and uses.
He has gone in the world, visioning
a house worthy of the child
newborn in it.