Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

1971 and 1942

81 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g 1 9 7 1 a n d 1 9 4 2 What does Yeats mean, The heart grows old? The impulse toward romance and sexual need gets less sharp? I have a friend who has made himself a saint of lust. Mac Intyre! It is a quiet birdless Sabbath night as I read Lowell, his final doubt of the messiah. I admire his effort to say what guidance we get in this clarifying of unique light. Can we learn to listen? To what and how and where? Just before dawn, one candle in the cabin. Can we follow what we are shown? Is disobedience also the way and patience an unnecessary suffering? What does it mean to me, The heart grows old? A few memories of my mother, dead now thirty years. Her belief, when pressed, was that the world began with Adam and Eve in 4004 B.C., a Monday morning, January 1st. When I went off to college and graded papers in the religion department at the University of North Carolina, we had a running argument about that oriental document, Genesis B, my mother and me, she on her couch-nest flustered, I arrogant and cool in dad’s chair. Carbon dating fazed her less than my dating. • • • 82 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g Mother had the innate joy of morning’s fresh matter, the shine of October in the South. The war effort, the victory garden and victory goat and rams and cows running loose over the campus. The magical cattle guard gate, a xylophone under the Zephyr. I used to go pretend grocery shopping on my tricycle. Out from the cool moss walk no sun ever hit, into the sun, pick up some leaves and rocks, make a circle inside the tower and come back with the goods. Umm, good. What is this? Fried chicken. What is this? Butter pecan ice cream. Every day was an adventure for my mother, and scary. Afraid of cars, the bluff, afraid of hurting and falling, mice and snakes and roaches. She never drank. She woke pure emanation. I give myself her mornings again, and listen to be led. Last night I was shown in dream how to be in front of a group without notes, or maybe my fear of that. Anyway, no more arrant New Critical chicanery. I bow to the mother of morning and laughter and to the father of smoke. My father’s heart did and did not grow old. He was bored and bitter sometimes, but the last six weeks of his life he was more open than anyone I have ever seen, filled with a big no-worry, no holding-back love for everyone he met. He could see 83 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g their souls there valiantly embodied, singing their solo peeps however they must. Mother died in early May, he the 3rd of July, bending to kiss the plume of a lobby water fountain. There is an ache in me when I say 1971 and 1942, a hollow holler! That is how the heart grows old, re-inhabiting the five-year-old and thirty-four-year-old, empty and fragile with working. It is the end of some summer. My parents are sitting out on the bluff as the sun goes down, in those homemade Adirondack chairs. Here comes the Lake Queen excursion boat around the far bend under Lookout with its watery tingle of dance music and the second level which is all dancefloor, and when they slide past this bluff, some of them will come to the railing and wave. I’ll pull one of these heavy wooden chairs over and sit with them. Hub and Bets. What else might I do with this evening? The reading and writing work must wait on this love. One thing we children would do was yell across the river and Williams Island and the river again straight into Elder Mountain. Our voices came back small and perfected. Just vowels were best, ooooooooooooooooo, 84 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g but also short sentences like, I can’t hear you. or Call me Raccoon, which was...