Galway Kinnell–Online Poems Essay, Research Paper

Saint Francis And The Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath

them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

? 1980 by Galway Kinnell

Online Source: http://faculty.washington.edu/jnh/vol1no1/sow.htm

Fergus Falling

He climbed to the top

of one of those million white pines

set out across the emptying pastures

of the fifties – some program to enrich the rich

and rebuke the forefathers

who cleared it all at once with ox and axe –

climbed to the top, probably to get out

of the shadow

not of those forefathers but of this father

and saw for the first time

down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off

its little steam in the afternoon,

pond where Clarence Akley came on Sunday mornings to cut

down

the cedars around the shore, I’d sometimes hear the slow

spondees

of his work, he’s gone,

where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was

fishing and

stood awhile before I knew he was there, he’s the one who

put the

cedar shingles on the house, some have curled or split, a

few have

blown off, he’s gone,

where Gus Newland logged in the cold snap of ‘58, the only

man will-

ing to go into those woods that never got warmer than ten

below,

he’s gone,

pond where two wards of the state wandered on Halloween,

the Na-

tional Guard searched for them in November, in vain, the

next fall a

hunter found their skeletons huddled together, in vain,

they’re

gone,

pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits, drowning

hooked

worms, when he goes he’s replaced and is never gone,

and when Fergus

saw the pond for the first time

in the clear evening, saw its oldness down there

in its old place in the valley, he became heavier suddenly

in his bones

the way fledglings do just before they fly,

and the soft pine cracked . . .

I would not have heard his cry

if my electric saw had been working,

its carbide teeth speeding through the bland spruce of our

time, or

burning

black arcs into some scavenged hemlock plank,

like dark circles under eyes

when the brain thinks too close to the skin,

but I was sawing by hand and I heard that cry

as though he were attacked; we ran out,

when we bent over him he said, "Galway, In?s, I saw a

pond!"

His face went gray, his eyes fluttered close a frightening

moment . . .

Yes – a pond

that lets off its mist

on clear afternoons of August, in that valley

to which many have come, for their reasons,

from which many have gone, a few for their reasons, most

not,

where even now and old fisherman only the pinetops can see

sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat, waiting for pickerel.

Copyright ? Galway Kinnell, 1980.

Online Source: http://www.whyvermont.com/essays/kinnell.htm

Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk

into your room, and pick you up,

and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me

hard,

as if clinging could save us. I think

you think

I will never die, I think I exude

to you the permanence of smoke or stars,

even as

my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell

the sun, don’t go down, I have stood by

as you told the flower, don’t grow old,

don’t die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,

I would suck the rot from your fingernail,

I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,

I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,

I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,

I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,

I would let nothing of you go, ever,

until washerwomen

feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,

and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,

and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,

and iron twists weapons toward the true north,

and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,

and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,

and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the

dark, O corpse-to-be …

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,

this the nightmare you wake screaming from:

being forever

in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone

quietly eating, you clambered up

on my lap: to all

the mouthfuls rising toward

all the mouths, at the top of your voice

you cried

your one word, caca! caca! caca!

and each spoonful

stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering

steam.

Yes,

you cling because

I, like you, only sooner

than you, will go down

the path of vanished alphabets,

the roadlessness

to the other side of the darkness,

your arms

like the shoes left behind,

like the adjectives in the halting speech

of old men,

which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself,

some impossible Tuesday

in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out

among the black stones

of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying

over their one word, ci-g?t, ci-g?t, ci-g?t,

and the raindrops

hitting you on the fontanel

over and over, and you standing there

unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens

you find yourself with someone you love

in a caf? at one end

of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar

where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error

of thinking,

one day all this will only be memory,

learn,

as you stand

at this end of the bridge which arcs,

from love, you think, into enduring love,

learn to reach deeper

into the sorrows

to come – to touch

the almost imaginary bones

under the face, to hear under the laughter

the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss

the mouth

which tells you, here,

here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon

sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once

in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite

wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel

of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.

Your eyes close inside your head,

in sleep. Already

in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,

when I come back

we will go out together,

we will walk out together among

the ten thousand things,

each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages

of dying is love.

from The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell

Copyright ? by Galway Kinnell

Online Source: http://www.efd.lth.se/~d92mn/mootown/kinnell.html

The Perch

There is a fork in a branch

of an ancient, enormous maple,

one of a grove of such trees,

where I climb sometimes and sit and look out

over miles of valleys and low hills.

Today on skis I took a friend

to show her the trees. We set out

down the road, turned in at

the lane which a few weeks ago,

when the trees were almost empty

and the November snows had not yet come,

lay thickly covered in bright red

and yellow leaves, crossed the swamp,

passed the cellar hole holding

the remains of the 1850s farmhouse

that had slid down into it by stages

in the thirties and forties, followed

the overgrown logging road

and came to the trees. I climbed up

to the perch, and this time looked

not into the distance but at

the tree itself, its trunk

contorted by the terrible struggle

of that time when it had its hard time.

After the trauma it grows less solid.

It may be some such time now comes upon me.

It would have to do with the unaccomplished,

and with the attempted marriage

of solitude and happiness. Then a rifle

sounded, several times, quite loud,

from across the valley, percussions

of the custom of male mastery

over the earth — the most graceful,

most alert of the animals

being chosen to die. I looked

to see if my friend had heard,

but she was stepping about on her skis,

studying the trees, smiling to herself,

her lips still filled, for all

we had drained them, with hundreds

and thousands of kisses. Just then

she looked up — the way, from low

to high, the god blesses — and the blue

of her eyes shone out of the black

and white of bark and snow, as lovers

who are walking on a freezing day

touch icy cheek to icy cheek,

kiss, then shudder to discover

the heat waiting inside their mouths.

from Galway Kinnell’s New Selected Poems

Copyright ? 2000 by Galway Kinnell.

Online Source: http://www.poems.com/perchkin.htm