What Comes Down to Us

25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets

Jeff Worley

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780813139135
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

What Comes Down To Us features twenty-five of Kentucky's most accomplished contemporary poets. Together they serve to illustrate the diversity and richness of poetry being written today in the Commonwealth. The poems were collected by Jeff Worley, a poet who has lived in Kentucky for more than two decades. Although the subject matter of the poems transcends the state's borders, the collection communicates a strong sense of Kentucky as a place. Worley's introduction places contemporary Kentucky poetry in the context of the state's rich literary tradition, and the poet biographies include their reflections and, often, their poetic approach and technique.

WENDELL

Berry

b. 1934

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

Burley Coulter's Song for Kate Helen Branch

The rugs were rolled back to the wall,
The band in place, the lamps all lit.
We talked and laughed a little bit
And then obeyed the caller's call—
Light-footed, happy, half entranced—
To balance, swing, and promenade.
Do you remember how we danced
And how the fiddler played?

About midnight we left the crowd
And wandered out to take a stroll.
We heard the treefrogs and the owl;
Nearby the creek was running loud.
The good dark held us as we chanced
The joy we two together made,
Remembering how we'd whirled and pranced
And how the fiddler played.

That night is many years ago
And gone, and still I see you clear,
Clear as the lamplight in your hair.
The old time comes around me now,
And I remember how you glanced
At me, and how we stepped and swayed.
I can't forget the way we danced,
The way the fiddler played.

Rising

for Kevin Flood

1.
Having danced until nearly
time to get up, I went on
in the harvest, half lame
with weariness. And he
took no notice, and made
no mention of my distress.
He went ahead, assuming
that I would follow. I followed,
dizzy, half blind, bitter
with sweat in the hot light.
He never turned his head,
a man well known by his back
in those fields in those days.
He led me through long rows
of misery, moving like a dancer
ahead of me, so elated
he was, and able, filled
with desire for the ground's growth.
We came finally to the high
still heat of four o'clock,
a long time before sleep.
And then he stood by me
and looked at me as I worked,
just looked, so that my own head
uttered his judgment, even
his laughter. He only said:
“That social life don't get
down the row, does it, boy?”

2.
I worked by will then, he
by desire. What was ordeal
for me, for him was order
and grace, ideal and real.

That was my awkward boyhood,
the time of his mastery.
He troubled me to become
what I had not thought to be.

3.
The boy must learn the man
whose life does not travel
along any road, toward
any other place,
but is a journey back and forth
in rows, and in the rounds
of years. His journey's end
is no place of ease, but the farm
itself, the place day labor
starts from, journeys in,
returns to: the fields
whose past and potency are one.

4.
And that is our story,
not of time, but the forever
returning events of light,
ancient knowledge seeking
its new minds. The man at dawn
in spring of the year,
going to the fields,
visionary of seed and desire,
is timeless as a star.

5.
Any man's death could end the story:
his mourners, having accompanied him
to the grave through all he knew,
turn back, leaving him complete.

But this is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.

For those who depart from it, bearing it
in their minds, the grave is a beginning.
It has weighted the earth with sudden
new gravity, the enrichment of pain.

There is a grave, too, in each
survivor. By it, the dead one lives.
He enters us, a broken blade,
sharp, clear as a lens or a mirror.

And he comes into us helpless, tender
as the newborn enter the world. Great
is the burden of our care. We must be true
to ourselves. How else will he know us?

Like a wound, grief receives him.
Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep
as part of ourselves the severe gift.
By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligence of life.
Where the tree falls the forest rises.
There is nowhere to stand but in absence,
no life but in the fateful light.

6.
Ended, a story is history;
it is in time, with time
lost. But if a man's life
continue in another man,
then the flesh will rhyme
its part in immortal song.
By absence, he comes again.

There is a kinship of the fields
that gives to the living the breath
of the dead. The earth
opened in the spring, opens
in all springs. Nameless,
ancient, many-lived, we reach
through ages with the seed.

Come Forth

I dreamed of my father when he was old.
We went to see some horses in a field;
they were sorrels, as red almost as blood,
the light gold on their shoulders and haunches.
Though they came to us, all a-tremble
with curiosity and snorty with caution,
they had never known bridle or harness.
My father walked among them, admiring,
for he was a knower of horses, and these were fine.

He leaned on a cane and dragged his feet
along the ground in hurried little steps
so that I called to him to take care, take care,
as the horses stamped and frolicked around him.
But while I warned, he seized the mane
of the nearest one. “It'll be all right,”
he said, and then from his broken stance
he leapt astride, and sat lithe and straight
and strong in the sun's unshadowed excellence.

Her First Calf

Her fate seizes her and brings her
down. She is heavy with it. It
wrings her. The great weight
is heaved out of her. It eases.
She moves into what she has become,
sure in her fate now
as a fish free in the current.
She turns to the calf who has broken
out of the womb's water and its veil.
He breathes. She licks his wet hair.
He gathers his legs under him
and rises. He stands, and his legs
wobble. After the months
of his pursuit of her, now
they meet face to face.
From the beginnings of the world
his arrival and her welcome
have been prepared. They have always
known each other.

To the Unseeable Animal

My daughter: “I hope there's an animal
somewhere that nobody has ever seen.
And I hope nobody ever sees it.”

Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods’ shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have waked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

III Look Out

Come to the window, look out, and see
the valley turning green in remembrance
of all springs past and to come, the woods
perfecting with immortal patience
the leaves that are the work of all of time,
the sycamore whose white limbs shed
the history of a man's life with their old bark,
the river under the morning's breath quivering
like the touched skin of a horse, and you will see
also the shadow cast upon it by fire, the war
that lights its way by burning the earth.

Come to your windows, people of the world,
look out at whatever you see wherever you are,
and you will see dancing upon it that shadow.
You will see that your place, wherever it is,
your house, your garden, your shop, your forest, your farm,
bears the shadow of its destruction by war
which is the economy of greed which is plunder
which is the economy of wrath which is fire.
The Lords of War sell the earth to buy fire,
they sell the water and air of life to buy fire.
They are little men grown great by willingness
to drive whatever exists into its perfect absence.
Their intention to destroy any place is solidly founded
upon their willingness t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Wendell Berry
• James Baker Hall
• Jane Gentry
• Richard Taylor
• Joe Survant
• Jonathan Greene
• Vivian Shipley
• Philip St. Clair
• Jeff Worley
• Jeffrey Skinner
• George Ella Lyon
• Leatha Kendrick
• Max Garland
• Marcia Hurlow
• Frederick Smock
• Aleda Shirley
• Sarah Gorham
• Tony Crunk
• Nikky Finney
• Don Boes
• Kathleen Driskell
• Frank X Walker
• Lynnell Edwards
• Maurice Manning
• Davis McCombs
• Poem Credits
• Photo Credits
• Index of Titles and First Lines