Pastoral

Last Easter, I gave my mother-in-law a large, brown, simple ceramic
            Navajo water pot, shiny with pine…

Classically, an idyll is a pastoral poem about shepherds. In more contemporary contexts, an idyll is often seen as similar to a pastoral or descriptive poem depicting a peaceful, idealized, rural scene or setting. It often celebrates the beauty of nature, rural life, and the harmony that can be found between people and the natural world. Idylls typically evoke a sense of tranquility and nostalgia, as well as a longing for a simpler, rural way of life.Well-known historical examples of the idyll include…

light coming into fog against invisible
top of ridge, blue jay on redwood fence
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

          starting from this concept,
          anything that is not 

          on...

a river slips
                        in shifting leaves
sifting. a river sifts
                        and falls to pieces
in which not seen
     ...

A poem that retreats from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of nature and rural life.

I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.
I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,

Thirst where the grasses burn in early May
And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay.

There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat
Grasshoppers...

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird,—
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining...

200 cows         more than 600 hilly acres

            property would have been even larger
had J not sold 66 acres to DuPont for
                waste from its Washington Works factory
where J was employed        
       ...

1


Just as there were reeds along the riverbank,
Just as there were clouds
Above my head, my lute was lying beside me on the grass.

I placed the little finger of my right hand on the soundboard,
Just below the strings.
Not the tip...

I acknowledge my status as a stranger:   
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits   
Out of sync with wasp and wren.   
I admit I don’t know how   
To sit still or move without purpose.   
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.   

But this lawn has been leveled for...

Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide   
scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch   
empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here   
there is no house at all—

only the bones of a house,
lilacs growing beside them,
roses in clumps between them,   
honeysuckle over;
a gap...

Do you have adequate oxen for the job?
No, my oxen are inadequate.
Well, how many oxen would it take to do an adequate job?
I would need ten more oxen to do the job adequately.
I'll see if I can get them for...

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.

I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that’s when I’m least to be trusted.

It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised
for my...

At that time the sheep called to him
From their wormy bellies, as they
Lay bloating in the field. He was
A pastoralist,
The schoolhouse hardly handsize
In a sky of flax.

                             He began
Then to keep the sayings of man
(The left hand writing; the right...

From the forests and highlands
         We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
         Where loud waves are dumb
                Listening to my sweet pipings.
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
         The bees on the bells of thyme,
The...

and sex once
a day a week a
month a year
goes by and one
hyacinth only
returns, frail
blue against the militant
grass that does cover all
in the residential
precinct of the
New England town
its roads long paved
old Indian trails the steps
they took toward
us the first
exchange for a...

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron...

      Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine,
To sit...

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,
And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand
The lawns...