You can see the rainclouds gather and pass,

Over Hadley’s Beach or the Artois plain;

And dust on the grass is dust on the grass,

In Guysborough County or Port of Spain.

RAIN, and blown sand, and southwest wind

Have rubbed these shingles crisp and paper-thin.

Come in:

Something has stripped these studding-posts and pinned

Time to the rafters. Where the woodworm ticked

Shick shick shick shick

Steady and secretive, his track is plain:

The fallen bark is dust; the beams are bare.

Bare as the bare stone of this open shore,

This building grey as stone. The filtered sun

Leaks cold and quiet through it. And the rain,

The wind, the whispering sand, return to finger

Its creaking wall, and creak its thuttering door.

Old, as the shore is. But they use the place.

Wait if you like: someone will come to find

A handline or a gutting-knife, or stow

A coiled net in the loft. Or just to smoke

And loaf; and swap tomorrow in slow talk;

And knock his pipe out on a killick-rock

Someone left lying sixty years ago.

THE old ewes ruminate; their ancient eyes

Are blurred with something you could take for thinking;

The taste of frosty grass, the blatting cries

Of young ones lost, the wind, the late sun sinking.

But the young lambs, replete, and quickly tiring

Of rest, and uncompelled of why or whether,

Suddenly break—instinctively conspiring

To rush the rutted pasture track together.

Past the grey stonepiles, and the rotting stumps

They race, through withering grass, in crumbling gravel—

Surge in the wheel tracks, leap the tufted humps

In the mock fury of their plunging travel.

Until, by their own singing blood assailed,

Themselves encircled by the thing they are chasing,

They swerve and halt. Knob-kneed and shiver-tailed,

They halt between the racing and the racing.

The late sun sinks. The old ewes ruminate;

And unconcerned with fleeing and pursuing,

Observe; and view the falling night, and wait—

Austere and prim and grey, and slowly chewing.

THIS house is built within a sheltering

Sweep of the hills. You will not find the sea

From attic windows; and the seasons bring

No lift and change of tide, here in the lee

Of the land’s high windbreak, where the buffeting

Onshore wind is tripped on the mountain’s knee.

No mist of blowing salt is flung to sting

The trusting flesh. You will not find the sea.

This property is private. Drifting rain

Beats on its shingles and its native stone;

The wind of August on its leaning grain

Is dark with shadow, and the leaves are blown

To a soft thunder. But the hills remain;

Their strength is certain and their purpose known.

Only at night, in the stillness, low and plain

You can hear the far deep rumor of sea on stone.

SEARCHING the windy strait with narrowed frown,

She finds between the wrinkled rise and fall

Of marching seas, a dory, cruising down

The channel’s reach with tubs of running trawl.

His time were better spent, she knows, attending

The careful urging of her common sense:

Breaking the upper field to seed, and mending

The kitchen roof, and bracing flattened fence . . .

But as he climbs the rutted pasture now,

Hungry from wind and tide, and oar and barrow—

Her heart forgets the sowing and the plow,

Meeting again the strength that never took

its grace from gardens, and the long clear look

That never learned its blue behind a harrow.

HIS speckled pastures dipped to meet the beach

Where the old fish huts stood. At his front door

A man could stand and see the whole wide reach

Of blue Atlantic. But he stayed ashore.

He stayed ashore and plowed, and drilled his rows,

And planned his hours and finished what he planned.

And made his profits: colts and calves and ewes

And buildings and piled stone and harrowed land.

He was a careful man, a trifle cold

To meet and talk to. There were some who thought

His hand was a bit grasping, when he sold;

A little slow to open when he bought.

But no one said it that way. When you heard

His habits mentioned, there would be a pause.

And then the soft explanatory word.

They said he was dry-footed. And he was.

Trampling in damp earth the wet glistening stems,

And the dry rustle of last year’s yellow oats

Lives in the senses; while the moment drifts

He sees, hears, feels the rush of wind and shadow,

Feels in his grip the scythe—

The scythe, the shoulder’s ache and the clenched grip

On skinsmooth handles; and the moment fades—

Fades, and reshapens: his flexed fingers crook

To the gripped jolt of oars. The falling swath

Is rolling groundswell; where an oatfield was,

The dark fleet glitter of next summer’s herring

Gleams; till the shimmer wavers and is lost

(wet oilskin, blowing spray)

In sodden fabric and the bite of rain.

Move in a sea of sense, and waves of thought

March to the shore of mind.

Halting, he turns to lift one ranging glance

At raingrey water under a sea of cloud.

FAR up the pasture at the edge of sky

Toy cattle, red and black and brindle brown,

Doze under kneehigh maples. Nearer by

The colt-size gelding at the fence puts down

A tentative hoof, and idly, switching flies,

Snorts and is still. Along the stable wall

The garrulous hens, drowsing with lidded eyes,

Forget to peck and chirk. And over all

The languorous sunlight swims . . . No shouted word,

No laugh, no bark of engines. Nothing jars

The insect-busy stillness; beast and bird

Take dreaming rest. And by the pasture bars,

A boy in breeches and a drawstring blouse,

Wealthy with time (and free to spend it so)—

Gravely observes the Sunday calm of cows

And hens and horses. Wondering how they know.

THE look she gives you is a tightened thread

Between the stitches of her spoken thought.

In the deft warning of her shaken head

A guilt is whispered, and a lesson taught.

The careful shadow of remembering doubt

Lives in her eyes, and with an upright mind

She meets affliction: resolute, devout,

Never unkind and never wholly kind.

The years have given her all the years require:

Birch in the woodbox, credit at the store,

Comfort and friendship, work and food and fire;

But life has endless grief to answer for—

Death, and the sins of men and the blood’s desire,

And muddy footprints on the kitchen floor.

IT WAS before his time, but he had heard

Old men remembering, and now again

In his own age it came to him: the word,

The vanished laugh and the lost gesture.

Then

From dream and word the image: keel and frame

And adz-hewn timbers and a name in gilt.

Raked spars and blustering canvas and a name,

Spoken, remembered: “On this beach they built

The Princess Dagmar . . .”

He would sail them up

Out of the sea of time, and they were true.

We listened; along the wharves the harbor lop

Splashed the black pilings. And the thing we knew

Was true as Jason; and the thousand keels

At Aulis; or the loom of Hiram’s fleet

Off Tyre, with peacocks. And those blackened sails

Blown homeward from the island they called Crete.

SHE turns the ancient wheel,

With grave and careful eyes

Fixed on the moment’s thought;

And her veined hands are wise

In the touch of a living craft,

And the fibre of carded wool

Rolled in the brushing wire

For the steel spindle’s pull.

She lives for a moment now

In a room bright with sun

In the house of her musing mind;

And the brief dreaming done,

Turns again to the spinning,

With senses keen to the feel

Of the yarn, and the muted throbbing

Of whirling spindle and wheel.

Evening falls on the panes

And her body moving still,

Rapt in the wakened youth

Of old and stubborn skill—

Matching the carded rolls

To the wheel’s droning rhyme,

With her grey eyes amused

At the long skein of time.

THE opposite shore was low and far, and flawed

With Asian darkness. Nothing gleamed. No stir

Of wind or tide could reach the cobalt blur

Of that dim country under sleeping cloud.

We sailed that water once, on drumming wind.

Astern the landmarks merged and fell away.

And slowly there, across that marching sway

Of seas, the blue shore lightened . . . and was land.

Far out, beyond our bowsprit’s veer and swerve

The blue land livened: planes of bronze and green

Broke on the slopes unfolding there, between

The shawl of cloud and the white thread of surf.

Slowly it sharpened: hills and climbing roads,

And fields above that measured rise and fall . . .

Barns, fences, houses, cattle, beetle-small

In pastures hemmed from the dark cape of woods.

Earth, rock, fields, people, were the leaf and bloom

Of that strange land. We sheltered in its lee.

And turned and saw the whole wide sky and sea,

And low and far, the cobalt blur of home.

THIS is the season when the darkest grass

Flows in its deepest waves, on fading stubble;

The time of cloud; and cattle brought to stable

At dusk; and moonlit water still as glass . . .

Smoke in the mornings, and always a crow caws

On wagging wings. Across the first strewn litter

Of leaves a squirrel scurries, and children loiter

In roadside pastures after ripening haws.

Time to be thoughtful: time to be getting on

With threshing, and fall plowing; time to gather

Eelgrass, for banking house . . . A frail white feather

Of frost shines in the grass blades and is gone.

Slowly the days grow colder, the long nights fall;

Plows turn the stubble, fires are tended, and apples

Mellow in cellars; and under the roots of maples

Mice are burrowing. And the high geese call.

HE STANDS and walks as if his knees were tensed

To a pitching dory. When he looks far off

You think of trawl-kegs rolling in the trough

Of swaying waves. He wears a cap against

The sun on water, but his face is brown

As an old mainsail, from the eyebrows down.

He has grown old as something used and known

Grows old with custom; each small fading scar

Engrained by use and wear in plank and spar,

In weathered wood and iron, and flesh and bone.

But youth lurks in the squinting eyes, and in

The laughter wrinkles in the tanbark skin.

You know his story when you see him climb

The lookout hill. You know that age can be

A hill for looking; and the swaying sea

A lifetime marching with the waves of time.

Listen—the ceaseless cadence, deep and slow.

Tomorrow. Now. And years and years ago.

IN DAYLIGHT, there is life and living speech;

The constant grumble, the resilient splash

Of slow tide lifting on a slanted beach;

And blowing sunlight. And the measured flash

Of the sea marching . . . But the beach and bay

Are vague as midnight now; in midnight thinned

At the sky’s edge by the first hint of grey.

And calm as sleep before the morning wind.

Calmer than sleep. But the eyes lift to find

In the veiled night the faint recurring spark

Of a known beacon. And the listening mind

Wakes in the stillness; and the veil is stirred

By a dim ghost of sound—a far-off word

And the soft thump of rowlocks in the dark.

THIS day you wonder, finding nowhere quite

What you expect to find. The strident air

Surrounds you like a sea of sweeping light;

The hills and fields return you stare for stare.

Humpbacked and grim, the giant juniper

Bows down to scowl; across the crawling grass

Beyond, where the twin Balm o’ Gileads were,

Two strangers halt and stiffen as you pass.

Something is altered here. The difference

Between you and the blowing world is thinned.

You turn to face the house, and common sense,

And see a woman shouldering the wind.

Turn to the barn, and see an old man leaning,

Intent, to hear those droning syllables—

Those phrases harsh and high, and wild with meaning,

Of shouted sound from granite-throated hills.

THEY have held funerals and weddings here.

And on the wall, in cardboard and dull gilt,

They keep the faces, bearded, stern, austere,

Of men who cleared the place, and plowed and built—

And women: bold, shy, laughing, sensitive,

Or stiff with pride, in frills of lace and lawn,

Who came serenely to this house to live

And brought their girlhood with them, and are gone.

This is the room they held against the claims

Of earth and sea and time—the touch of grace.

And you can see them in their oval frames

In gowns of buttoned satin, and white lace.

RED spruce and fir have crossed the broken lines

Where ragged fences ran; ground-juniper

Covers the sunny slope where currant bushes

Blackened their hanging clusters in green leaves.

Where oats and timothy moved like leaning water

Under the cloudy sweep of August wind,

The crop is stunted alders and tall ferns.

Above the cellar’s crust of falling stone

Where timbered walls endured the treacherous

Traffic of frost and sunlight, nothing stands . . .

Under the wreckage of the vanished barn

A woodchuck burrows. Where the dooryard was,

The matted grass of years encloses now

Two horseshoes and a rusted wagon-tire.

Only the apple trees recall the dream

That flowered here—in love and sweat and growth,

Anger and longing. Tough and dark and wild,

Grown big of stump, rough in the bark and old,

They still put forth a light ironic bloom

Against the green utility of spruce.

Clearing and field and buildings gone to waste—

But in the fall, a gunner going home

Will halt a moment, lift a hand to reach

One dusky branch above the crooked track,

And, thinking idly of his kitchen fire,

Bite to the small black shining seeds and learn

The taste of ninety seasons, hard and sweet.

FORGET the trumpets and the studied gleam

Of polished phrases, and the ringing speech;

We know the record; and we know the dream

That quickens where these hills and rivers reach.

Think now of common things, remembering now

The earth’s long habits time could never break:

Seed in the furrow, apples on the bough . . .

Steep Creek and Sand Point and Manassette Lake.

Smell of the rain-wet stubble and no wind blowing,

Chimney smoke, and glitter of rain in the grass;

Grey light growing

And the wide bay smooth as glass.

Look inward now at hill and field and shore,

The strait’s dark channel ringed with morning red;

And yellow lamplight through an open door . . .

Melford and Oyster Ponds and Ragged Head.

The careful nations, in their long pursuits,

Amend the treaty and revise the plan—

But Mulgrave shivered on the convoy routes

And Boylston cleared the rubble-heaps of Caen.

Clattering wheels on the road, and a dark wind crawling

Up from east, and the far surf curling white;

Grey dusk falling

And the flicker of Queensport Light.

IF THEY stay they stay, if they go they go;

On the Mulgrave Road it’s a choice you make.

There’s an axe in the stump and a fork in the row

Or a bag to pack and a train to take.

Sandy was one of the wandering sort;

Not for adventure, not for play;

But a fellow that cut the talking short

And followed the earth for a season’s pay.

It was just that his hardwood stand was gone

From the sidehill woodlot across the creek—

And he shipped on a tramp at West Saint John

For Boston, Georgetown and Martinique.

His hands were busy with sea and stone,

Timber and tractor, rope and bale.

The years grew short. And his grin was known

In Denver and Brandon, Spokane, Trail.

He knew Dundee and the Surrey Docks

And the wired shoulders of Vimy Ridge

As well as the road of gravel and rocks

From Grady’s Place to the Iron Bridge.

You can see the rainclouds gather and pass

Over Hadley’s Beach or the Artois plain;

And dust on the grass is dust on the grass

In Guysborough County or Port of Spain.

It was oar and crosscut, shovel and crank,

Hour by hour and year by year;

Till he heard, in a dory on Georges Bank,

Adventure calling, sudden and clear.

If they go they go, if they stay they stay;

But once in a hundred a man will pack

His clothes—and his habits—and roll away;

Or a lad with the wandering eye come back.

It was just that he knew, in his tranquil mind,

He was done with the habit of chance and change;

And his eyes were eager at last to find

Something different, something strange.

You can find him deep in his venture still,

The green oats growing, the young corn hoed—

Where the stumps are gone from a hardwood hill

By the turn of a creek on the Mulgrave Road.

Words are never enough . . .

NOW I am thankful this unbroken flesh

Has known hard rowing, and the trenchant bite

Of cold salt water, as reluctant mesh

Came up at sunrise from the tidal night.

Wisdom was in the brief recurrent shock

Of bodies braced against a plunging line;

Familiar meaning in the liquid knock

Of building swell concerned with buoyant pine.

Only in some black biting hour we learn

How strength and wit lie dreaming in the brain . . .

Now at its need the wakened mind shall turn

An oilskin to the dictatorial rain:

What shall a little wind of words avail

Against a heart close-hauled, with shortened sail?

THIS ghost is much embarrassed that his son,

Learned in a gentler way of thought and speech,

Should still consider where the mackerel run

And three grey fish huts on a windy beach.

Embarrassed but unsurprised. His heart has known

That kinship tempered in an offshore blow,

More eloquent than blood to mark its own,

Pulsed always in us. And he knows I know.

Lord, I address myself to you: be kind;

Mindful of how the cosmic current sets.

Though immortality be a state of mind,

Let there be clean firm bottom for the nets.

When it is time for this quick flesh to die

Let herring school through heaven’s hot July.

THESE are the fellows who smell of salt to the prairie,

Keep the back country informed of crumbling swell

That buckles the international course off Halifax

After a night of wind:

Angus Walters and Ben Pine, carrying on for Tommy Himmelman and Marty Welch;

Heading up the tough men who get into the news,

Heading up the hard men of Lunenburg and Gloucester,

Keeping the cities bordered with grass and grain

Forever mindful that something wet and salt

Creeps and loafs and marches round the continent,

Careless of time, careless of change, obeying the moon.

Listen to little Angus, squinting at the Bluenose:

“The timber that’ll beat her still stands in the woods.”

Yes, these are the fellows who remind you again of the sea.

But one town, or two,

Are never enough to keep the salt in the blood.

I haven’t seen Queensport Light over the loom of Ragged Head in years,

And never a smell of rollers coming up the bay from Canso.

No one ever heard of Queensport outside of a bait report;

No one ever saw the name of Ragged Head anywhere.

Off that obscure beach, Will Bruce and George McMaster

Set their herring nets, and went farther out for mackerel.

The mackerel never ran, but in July

Fat herring tangled in wet twine were silver-thick,

And the flat low in the water as we hauled around

To head back for the huts;

In full daylight now,

After the grey dusk of a windless morning;

After the bay, gently stirring in half darkness,

Tipped down again to blush at the sun’s rim.

Cleaning fish is a job you would balk at;

But nothing is mean with gulls hovering down,

Sun brighter than life on glistening eelgrass,

The bay crawling again in a quickening southwest wind.

There was always time, after the wash-barrels were empty,

After hand-barrows were lugged up the beach to the hut,

And herring lay behind hand-wrought staves, clean with salt.

Time to lie on warm stone and listen,

While the sting went out of crooked fingers and thighs ceased to ache;

Time to hear men’s voices, coming quietly through a colored cloth of sound

Woven in the slap of water on fluent gravel.

Their talk was slow and quiet, of fish and men

And fields back on the hill with fences down,

Hay to be made through long hot days with never a splash on the oilskins,

Or the lift of water awake under half-inch pine.

The mackerel never ran; and if the herring

Had been only a story, a legend for midnight telling,

These would have launched their flats and tended the empty nets.

I know it now, remembering now the calm;

Remembering now the lowering care that lifted

From a face turned to the wind off Ragged Head.

These are the fellows who keep the salt in the blood.

Knowing it fresh in themselves, needful as hope,

They give to the cities bordered with woods and grass

A few homesick men, walking an alien street;

A few women, remembering misty stars

And the long grumbling sigh of the bay at night.

Words are never enough; these are aware

Somewhere deep in the soundless well of knowing,

That sea, in the flesh and nerves and the puzzling mind

Of children born to the long grip of its tide,

Must always wash the land’s remotest heart.

These are the fellows who keep the salt in the blood.

The traffic of flesh and dust, the long percentage

Shared by the living and the powdered bone . . .

AS WHEN, through plated folds of finite space

We peered at distance, and the subtle glass

Brought up the stick and stone of place and place,

Far hillsides, forests, cattle deep in grass,

And drew their fabric—leaf and root and limb,

The rock, the road, the falling stream, the blown

White fringe of vapor on the mountain’s rim—

In, to the dooryard’s earth and stick and stone:

The moving moments come: and all, all, all,

Drawn to this breath, this now, this something said

Of space and time . . . and lamplight on the wall,

And someone slowly going up to bed.

EAST of the port, the gaunt euclidean town

At the edge of the prairie sky, at the venturous end

Of the sea’s last traffic with the climbing land—

You come to the hills. The spruce and rock steep down

To the mountain beach. Inlet and channel and reef

Return, in the slow dance of the land’s turning;

Shadowed and clear and dark in the desolate raining

Of lost and shadowy light, and the lost brief

Moment; flashed and repeated in the drumming wheels.

Repeat . . . repeat . . . repeat; the flashing earth

Streams in its rhythm; and the moment’s breath

Is time’s deliberate breath. The wheeling hills

Of stonegrey water and precambrian rock.

STRANGE to have found, in the dust of this late day

The old faith and frankness, the shared sun,

The shared wanting and liking;

The understanding and the mirth we put away

Years ago, when the time came to accept

Another time, and the time of our own was done.

No promise ever made, yet a promise kept;

And stranger still to find it now and here

When living is rapt in a world’s wheeling and striking;

And to stay and think

In the heart of this purpose, back to a wistful year—

The rough drone of a press, and the wet-sweet smell of ink.

The questioning mind looks back, and finds and forms

In questioning speech, all things that marked us after

The old doorway closed. Never so much

Of new and old merged in our dreams before.

And the mind warms

To this new grace in long-remembered laughter.

And the blood pounds at your touch.

BEHIND me on this ancient ledge

Of rock along the mountain’s edge

The wind goes washing through high trees

Remotely, with a sound of seas.

Far out and down, the casual sea

Curls to the land deliberately.

Between, the rolling fields lie low

In wind and sun. Far off, a row

Of poplars, dark on speckled blue

Curve to the sky. And nearer to . . .

A field, a pasture, someone going

From house to barn, a clothesline blowing;

A pond, and maples on a hill

That move, and cattle standing still;

A road, and whirling dust; a brook—

And in its looped and gleaming crook

A man with horses, harrowing land.

He halts a minute there, to stand

And look beyond his pasture, where

A high kite hangs in streaming air.

And higher than the heart can fly

A white gull sails the blowing sky.

I like it here. I like to sprawl

On rocks and grass and see it all;

Although I know that curling seas

And hills and fields and rocks and trees

And men and boys with kites to fly

And women putting sheets to dry

And gulls on waves of surging air

Will never get me anywhere.

THE question is never answered, never resolved,

The circle of love and anger never squared,

The stubborn instinct not translated yet

In decimals, accurate and predictable

In union dues or payroll cuts or blood . . .

Always a symbol lost in the lovely theorem,

A fraction that will not fit in the sum of the system,

A jutting thrust in the graph of the commissar’s forecast,

A troublesome blank in the gauleiter’s careful accounting,

An awkward hitch in the plans of the second vice-president.

The answers worked on the slate are never the same,

And the answers proved in the back of the book are wrong.