Winter Landscape

The three men coming down the winter hill

In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds

At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,

Past the five figures at the burning straw,

Returning cold and silent to their town,

Returning to the drifted snow, the rink

Lively with children, to the older men,

The long companions they can never reach,

The blue light, men with ladders, by the church

The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,

Are not aware that in the sandy time

To come, the evil waste of history

Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow

Of that same hill: when all their company

Will have been irrecoverably lost,

These men, this particular three in brown

Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say

By their configuration with the trees,

The small bridge, the red houses and the fire,

What place, what time, what morning occasion

Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds

At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,

Thence to return as now we see them and

Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill

Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

The Disciple

Summoned from offices and homes, we came.

By candle-light we heard him sing;

We saw him with a delicate length of string

Hide coins and bring a paper through a flame;

I was amazed by what that man could do.

And later on, in broad daylight,

He made someone sit suddenly upright

Who had lain long dead and whose face was blue.

But most he would astonish us with talk.

The warm sad cadence of his voice,

His compassion, and our terror of his choice,

Brought each of us both glad and mad to walk

Beside him in the hills after sundown.

He spoke of birds, of children, long

And rubbing tribulation without song

For the indigent and crippled of this town.

Ventriloquist and strolling mage, from us,

Respectable citizens, he took

The hearts and swashed them in an upland brook,

Calling them his, all men’s, anonymous.

. . He gained a certain notoriety;

The magical outcome of such love

The State saw it could not at all approve

And sought to learn where when that man would be.

The people he had entertained stood by,

I was among them, but one whom

He harboured kissed him for the coppers’ doom,

Repenting later most bitterly.

They ran him down and drove him up the hill.

He who had lifted but hearts stood

With thieves, performing still what tricks he could

For men to come, rapt in compassion still.

Great nonsense has been spoken of that time.

But I can tell you I saw then

A terrible darkness on the face of men,

His last astonishment; and now that I’m

Old I behold it as a young man yet.

None of us now knows what it means,

But to this day our loves and disciplines

Worry themselves there. We do not forget.

A Point of Age, Part I

At twenty-five a man is on his way.

The desolate childhood smokes on the dead hill,

My adolescent brothels are shut down

For industry has moved out of that town;

Only the time-dishonoured beggars and

The flat policemen, victims, I see still.

Twenty-five is a time to move away.

The travelling hands upon the tower call,

The clock-face telescopes a long desire:

Out of the city as the autos stream

I watch, I whisper, Is it time . . time?

Fog is enveloping the bridges, lodgers

Shoulder and fist each other in the mire

Where later, leaves, untidy lives will fall.

Companions, travellers, by luck, by fault

Whose none can ever decide, friends I had

Have frozen back or slipt ahead or let

Landscape juggle their destinations, slut

Solace and drink drown the degraded eye.

The fog is settling and the night falls, sad,

Across the forward shadows where friends halt.

Images are the mind’s life, and they change.

How to arrange it—what can one afford

When ghosts and goods tether the twitching will

Where it has stood content and would stand still

If time’s map bore the brat of time intact?

Odysseys I examine, bed on a board,

Heartbreak familiar as the heart is strange.

In the city of the stranger I discovered

Strike and corruption: cars reared on the bench

To horn their justice at the citizen’s head

And hallow the citizen deaf, half-dead.

The quiet man from his own window saw

Insane wind take the ash, his favourite branch

Wrench, crack; the hawk came down, the raven hovered.

Slow spent stars wheel and dwindle where I fell.

Physicians are a constellation where

The blown brain sits a fascist to the heart.

Late, it is late, and it is time to start.

Sanction the civic woe, deal with your dear,

Convince the stranger: none of us is well.

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

Copyright © 2014 by Kathleen Berryman Donahue

Introduction and selection copyright © 2014 by Daniel Swift