Poems, 1957–1967

SPRINGER MOUNTAIN

SPRINGER MOUNTAIN Four sweaters are woven upon me, All black, all sweating and waiting, And a sheepherder's coat's wool hood, Buttoned strainingly, holds my eyes With their sight deepfrozen outside them From their gaze toward a single tree. I am here where I never have been, In the limbs of my warmest clothes, Waiting for light to crawl, weakly From leaf to dead leaf onto leaf Down the western side of the mountain. Deer sleeping in light far above me Have already woken, and moved, In step with the sun moving strangely Down toward the dark knit of my thicket Where my breath takes shape on the air Like a white helmet come from the lungs. The one tree I hope for goes inward And reaches the limbs of its gold. My eyesight hangs partly between Two twigs on the upslanting ground, Then steps like a god from the dead Wet of a half-rotted oak log Steeply into the full of my brow. My thighbones groaningly break Upward, releasing my body To climb, and to find among humus New insteps made of snapped sticks. On my back the faggot of arrows Rattles and scratches its feathers. I go up over logs slowly On my painfully reborn legs, My ears putting out vast hearing Among the invisible animals, 130 Passing under thin branches held still, Kept formed all night as they were By the thought of predictable light. The sun comes openly in To my mouth, and is blown out white, But no deer is anywhere near me. I sit down and wait as in darkness. The sweat goes dead at the roots Of my hair: a deer is created Descending, then standing and looking. The sun stands and waits for his horns To move. I may be there, also, Between them, in head bones uplifted Like a man in an animal tree Nailed until light comes: A dream of the unfeared hunter Who has formed in his brain in the dark And rose with light into his horns, Naked, and I have turned younger At forty than I ever have been. I hang my longbow on a branch. The buck leaps away and then stops, And I step forward, stepping out Of my shadow and pulling over My head one dark heavy sweater After another, my dungarees falling Till they can be kicked away, Boots, socks, all that is on me Off. The world catches fire. I put an unbearable light Into breath skinned alive of its garments: I think, beginning with laurel, Helmets 131 Like a beast loving With the whole god bone of his horns: The green of excess is upon me Like deer in fir thickets in winter Stamping and dreaming of men Who will kneel with them naked to break The ice from streams with their faces And drink from the lifespring of beasts. He is moving. I am with him Down the shuddering hillside moving Through trees and around, inside And out of stumps and groves Of laurel and slash pine, Through hip-searing branches and thorn Brakes, unprotected and sure, Winding down to the waters of life Where they stand petrified in a creek bed Yet melt and flow from the hills At the touch of an animal visage, Rejoicing wherever I come to With the gold of my breast unwrapped, My crazed laughter pure as good church-cloth, My brain dazed and pointed with trying To grow horns, glad that it cannot, For a few steps deep in the dance Of what I most am and should be And can be only once in this life. He is gone below, and I limp To look for my clothes in the world, A middle-aged, softening man Grinning and shaking his head In amazement to last him forever. I put on the warm-bodied wool, The four sweaters inside out, The bootlaces dangling and tripping, 132 Then pick my tense bow off the limb And turn with the unwinding hooftracks, In my good, tricked clothes, To hunt, under Springer Mountain, Deer for the first and last time. Helmets 133 ...