Still.

Hoyt Library, Saginaw, Michigan, 1908

The STONY GARDEN

The stony garden of the spirit grows

Things never harvested in ordered rows.

Time had no home in me.

Sometimes when the leaves in the elm gather the last of light,

The eternal seems to come near me:

The evening wind ruffles the smallest puddles.

A stranger without a shadow moves in the old garden.

Bring me, long ghost, another chance of light:

I'm waiting for the winter up my sleeve.

The dried stalks, the shrunken

Ends of stems,

Once lively and light

In the white air,

In the far field where

The goldfinches swung,

Perched sideways

When the buds came out,

Pink and naked as young mice...

How else? 0 it's all heeded: I'm strung-up on strings, a mangy

chrysanthemum head, scraggly, hunting the sun ...

This earth gray with death-sweated and dead:

All pocked and pitted like cheap cement,

Broken to crusts; worm-riddled, blossomless --

Heaves here; only a stink of stalks. Hear

The cold scrapes of a hoe as we dig out

The corners of benches; empty these tables

Of humps and gourds ...

You whips of air:

I knew with what I staggered: I was crazed

Into a meaning more profound than what my fathers heard,

Those listening bearded men

Who cut the ground with hoes; and made with hands

An order out of muck and sand. Those Prussian men

Who hated uniforms.

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

What love-stirs! What loops and ropes of blossom! Seed-skins kissed by the sun! The faint horns uncurling! Bugs skimming through the oblique sunshafts!

And a song! Two songs, one outward, one inward

Echoing on each side of the glass,

One balanced on the edge of a wind-vent;

Another within, each singing things of the spirit,

This breathing, all upward, from leaves shining, wet,

The men wheeling in new dirt, their wheelbarrows creaking,

The sweat flashing on their faces, their palms wet,

Their palm-sweat flashing gold:

The day bright with its whiteness,

Those seeds in the next house already humping up dirt,

Heavy and hot. The bushels whisking past, that flip-flap fa

miliar, --

I was more than child when I saw this,

And time was immediate.

Something more asks me now:

See deeper than this:

That was a bright dancing of shapes

Before the pits, the sour lakes~ of the self,

Those times when alone I spoke to the wall.

New motions began in me, there in the filth,

But I came back, still with my blood.

All myself, too happy to ask

Why I was not struck down: haunting the shade,

I held my heart.

So the soul longs for its home.

The things of earth

Fly from us in the lightest wind. Do we

Dissolve, you deepest delvers of the skin? How

Chaste the nakedness when nature faces us:

A cold particular bulk of porous bone.

In all those bones a love was crying out.

I never heard it then; I hear them now,

The words I never gave to a dying man ...

How far's my father now?

Where has he gone, soft ears?

Tell me now. How far?

The sheep can't shear themselves.

Alone, alone, my cold ghost says.

Waking over, I went with the wind,

Praying with water:

My heels had been sleeping:

The brushing leaves kissed past my ears ...

Sway, flowers, leaning like reeds in a wave,

More motionable than insects.

The morning-glitter!

Caressive green waves, under foamings of color,

The cold shall not touch you . ..

Shaken loose, like milkweed on the wind,

Sure of its crevice,

Or the root of a blackened stem, still linked with life.

Still air, still; almost noon.

The leaves dry on the trellis.

Will the green slime take fire, the slime on the benches?

This soil is past itself, half-gray, half-green ...

The harp of the self stills.

Blue air, breathe on these nerves

Heat from the roses.

My hands are among blossoms,

Motion has narrowed,

My fingers natural.

Holding these, what do I hold?

More than a mold's kiss

Lifted into starlight,

Brought to this morning-shape.

My self breathes in these:

Star-flower, portal into the night,

Breathing brighter than water,

The twilight cannot whelm you.

Theodore Roethke