Grass-stains on knees are the least of their worries. The
ball is lost in the hay again. Earlier this spring, they
mowed a large section of this hayfield into a baseball
diamond and then adorned it with torn up bits of T-shirt
carefully arranged to mark out the bases. The infield is
cropped short but the outfield is truly out in the field. The
“hay” is really just a tangle of clover, some sort of
domestic grass and wild strawberries. The game itself is
doomed from the beginning. All attempts to keep the ball
in the infield wind up with the ball in the tall grass. It's
just a matter of time before this comes down to picking
berries rather than looking for the ball.
childhood...
nothing ever measures up
A flock of a hundred or more crows
In echelons of three or four
Were flying obvious search-patterns
Over a square mile of wet, recently ploughed
Country in Perth County, Ontario;
In spring so cold you might still call it winter.
There was no missing the fact of
Their intent to find what was to be found
For their provision. Without lamenting
The shortage of life's commodities,
They looked for food with such sure diligence
That discovery was a certainty;
For which they would pay neither taxes or rent.
Shadow and light both strove to be
The eight bell-ringers' company,
As with his gliding rope in hand,
Counting his changes, each did stand;
While rang and trembled every stone,
To music by the bell-mouths blown,
Till the bright clouds that towered on high
Seemed to re-echo cry with cry.
Still swang the clappers to and fro,
When, in the far-spread fields below,
I saw a ploughman with his team
Lift to the bells and fix on them
His distant eyes, as if he would
Drink in the utmost sound he could;
While near him sat his children three,
And in the green grass placidly
Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
The grasshopper's horn, and far off, high in the maples
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence,
Under a moon waning and worn and broken,
Tired with summer.
Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember you, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heartless.
Over my soul murmur your mute benediction
While I gaze, oh fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.
I AM the still rain falling,
Too tired for singing mirth--
Oh, be the green fields calling,
Oh, be for me the earth!
I am the brown bird pining
To leave the nest and fly--
Oh, be the fresh cloud shining,
Oh, be for me the sky!
Here in the teeth of this triumphant wind
That shakes the naked shadows on the ground,
Making a key-board of the earth to strike
From clattering tree and hedge a separate sound,
Bear witness for me that I loved my life,
All things that hurt me and all things that healed,
And that I swore to it this day in March,
Here at the edge of this new-broken field.
You only knew me, tell them I was glad
For every hour since my hour of birth,
And that I ceased to fear, as once I feared,
The last complete reunion with the earth.
If we took the old path
In the old field
The same gate would stand there
That will never yield.
Where the sun warmed us
With a cloak made of gold,
The rain would be falling
And the wind would be cold;
And we would stop to search
In the wind and the rain,
But we would not find the stargrass
By the path again.
In every daisy in the field
Full thirty morals are concealed,
And though but one of them be mine,
And I forget the twenty-nine,
Yet am I better off by far
Than rich men and their butlers are,
Who ever have of morals none,
While happy I at least have one.
You took the rare blue from my cloudy sky;
You shot the one bird in my silent wood;
You crushed my rose — one rose alone had I.
You have not known. You have not understood.
I would have shown you pictures I have seen
Of unimagined mountains, plains and seas;
I would have made you songs of leafy green,
If you had left me some small ecstasies.
Now let the one dear field be only field,
That was a garden for the mighty gods.
Take you its corn. I keep its better yield —
The glory that I found within its clods.
Oh, for a world empty of you,
Quite bare of anything.
With any likeness to the old.
For wild remembering!
A world so wholly different,
I would be different too.
And read, or mend, or plant the bulbs,
Without a thought of you.
But this can never be at all;
Some small thing thereabout
Would bring that same hurt back again,
And tear my wild heart out.
Perhaps the smell of yarrow flowers,
Of yarrow flowers set
In a lost field. White: yarrow flowers.
Out in the August wet.
Three sycamores down the road,
High, blotched, shaken in the cold
A field; cut in its grass,
A pool, like small, wild gold.
And this was all I saw.
As you came by with me
A day last week. Now you are dead.
What is it that I see?
Three sycamores down the road.
High, blotched, shaken in the cold;
A field; cut in its grass,
A pool, like small, wild gold.
Once I forgot all, everything,
In any day of fall or spring;
And even when I went to bed.
The little prayer I should have said.
I cannot now forget at all
Anything of spring or fall; —
The splutter of wind within a hedge;
Or smell of hyssop from the edge
Of a hot field; the field itself
Dry as a bone upon a shelf;
Or deer that fleet across a wood;
Or an old woman in a hood.
My prayers rise up, each like a spear,
So sharp that God cannot but hear.