JOHN HAINES (1958-1960) ~

 

Two Poems After Li Po

I — Conversation

If you ask me why

I live here on

this lonely hillside

I will smile and say:

The autumn leaves

drift on the moving

water, and

the world of men

is far away.

II — Quiet Night

Moonlight spills

across the bed,

outside the frost

is deepening.

I lie awake and

watch the changing

shadows, thinking

of the lonely earth.

A Letter

                  after Li Chang-yin

I will not ask you

what we know too well,

the heart has

its own intelligence.

I lower the flame in the lamp

by the snowbound window

and let the moonlight in.

Two thousand miles away

you have said goodbye,

and there is no returning.

After Chu Yuan

With you

I will go down

to the river

and bathe in a quiet pool.

I will dry your hair

in the sun

singing a little,

facing the quiet wind.

With you

I will climb the slope

of evening,

warmed and content,

thinking of home.

________________

John Haines

Of Your Passage, O Summer

Limberlost Press, 2004

JOHN HAINES ~

EARTH ~

 If the Owl Calls Again
by John Haines



at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it's not too cold,


I'll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him.


We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.


And then we'll sit
in the shadowy spruce and
pick the bones
of careless mice,


while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.


And when morning climbs
the limbs
we'll part without a sound,
fullfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.


_____________________


from ~
Winter News
(Wesleyan, 1962)

The poet's studio Richardson, Alaska

EARTH ~

ANCESTOR OF THE HUNTING HEART



There is a distance in the heart
and I know it well—
a somberness of winter branches,
dry stubble scarred with frost,
late of the sunburnt field.

Neither field, nor furrow,
nor woodlot patched with fences,
but something wilder: a distance
never cropped or plowed,
only by fire and the blade of the wind.

The distance is closer than
the broomswept hearth—
that time of year when leaves
cling to the bootsole,
are tracked indoors,
lie yellow on the kitchen floor.

Snow is a part of the distance,
cold ponds, and ice
that rings the cattle-trough.

Trees that are black at morning
are in the evening gray.
The distance lies between them,
a seed-strewn whiteness
through which the hunter comes.

Before him in the ashen snow-litter
of the village street
an old man makes his way,
bowed with sack and stick.

A child is pulling a sled.

The rest are camped indoors,
their damped fires smoking
in the early dusk.

JOHN HAINES

(1924 – March 2, 2011)





Photo © Dorothy Alexander