Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

With My Back

The Refuse Man I'm going to pull my stinking wagon through the streets and countryside, letting it smell up the highways and its odor crawl into the oneand two-family houses along the road and over the corn and wheatfields and let the cows raise their heads from munching to bellow their anger and the cop to draw up alongside my wagon—I'll be pulling it between the shafts—and let this cop, holding his nose, come over to ask in an awed voice what the hell it is I'm hauling and I'll tell him, as sweetly as I can, "A dish of rotted guts, an empty skull, a fetid breast, a swarming belly, a corpse, a man right out of his mother's belly given his occupation, and I've put myself between the shafts— a horse will not come near this; I had to, being a man." With My Back With my back to the insane world of the next room I look into my poetry for the gentleness in making do with the known facts. On his side of the wall sits a young man spilling fear from his mouth. I read in my poetry that fear teaches me to love and that love also is the beginning of fear so that I find myself upon a cutting edge. He in the room next door is bloody. I look in my poetry for what to do 90 Poems of the 1970s to help and read I must remain absolutely still. He must be allowed to think he is alone and that the world waits on him for decision. The Future I am going to leave a child in an empty room. She will have my body to look down on at my death, when she will ask of the room its address, the room silent, stretching across the sky. What comfort for her, my only expectation, as in her infancy she climbs upon my lap? My daughter, as I recede into the past, I give you this worth more than money, more than a tip on the market: keep strong; prepare to live without me as I am prepared. Autumn II For Wendell Berry A leaf lies shaking at my door, about to be blown away. If I should bring it into the still air of my room, it would lie quietly on the window sill facing the tree from which it fell. 91 ...