Late in the Day
© 2016 Ursula K. Le Guin
This edition © 2016 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
“Crossing the Cascades” first appeared in These Mountains That Separate Us: An East/West Dialogue Poem, Traprock Books, 2012.
“The Small Indian Pestle” appeared in Windfall as “The Small Yoncalla Pestle” in 2014.
“Hymn to Aphrodite” appeared in Prairie Schooner in 2015.
“Whiteness” appeared in The Los Angeles Review, issue 17, Red Hen Press, 2015.
“The Canada Lynx,” “Disremembering,” and “California Landscape
Paintings” appeared in Milk: A Poetry Magazine, issue 3/4, Bottle of Smoke Press, 2015.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–122–6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930905
Cover design by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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Contents
FOREWORD
RELATIONS
The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House
Incense
Kitchen Spoons
Earthenware
Kinship
Western Outlaws
The Canada Lynx
The One Thing Missing
CONTEMPLATIONS
In Ashland
My House
Contemplation at McCoy Creek
Constellating
Hymn to Time
Whiteness
Geology of the Northwest Coast
Hymn to Aphrodite
MESSENGERS
Element 80
The Story
Arion
Messages
The Dream Stone
Hermes Betrayed
FOUR LINES
The Salt
March
Harney County Catenaries
Artemisia Tridentata
Ecola
Written in the Dark
Song
Night Sounds
WORKS
Orders
The Games
To Her Task-Master
Definition, or, Seeing the Horse
Dead Languages
California Landscape Paintings at the Portland Art Museum
My Job
TIMES
New Year’s Day
Seasonal Lines
October
Sea Hallowe’en
Between
Writing Twilight
THE OLD MUSIC
The Old Music
Disremembering
Crossing the Cascades
Sorrowsong
The Old Mad Queen
The Pursuit
2014: A Hymn
ENVOI
The Mist Horse
AFTERWORD
POSTSCRIPT
FOREWORD
Deep in Admiration
Given at the conference “Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet” at UC Santa Cruz, May 2014, this short talk sums up ideas that many of my poems of the last few years have expressed or have been groping toward.
I heard the poet Bill Siverly this week say that the essence of modern high technology is to consider the world as disposable: use it and throw it away. The people at this conference are here to think about how to get outside the mindset that sees the technofix as the answer to all problems. It’s easy to say we don’t need more “high” technologies inescapably dependent on despoliation of the earth. It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old and new—pottery-making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creation, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.
Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis. And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and to non-living beings—our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things.
Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal—always at least two-way, back-and-forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.
In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything—all beings—including what we generally class as things, objects.
Descartes and the behaviorists willfully saw dogs as machines, without feeling. Is seeing plants as without feeling a similar arrogance?
One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources,” is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.
I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.
What tools have we got to help us make that reach? In Romantic Things Mary Jacobus writes, “The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such things—to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees.”
Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for.” A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.
Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless “information” that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.
By replacing unfounded, willful opinion, science can increase moral sensitivity; by demonstrating and performing aesthetic order or beauty, poetry can move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings, waste and cruelty.
Poetry often serves religion; and the monotheistic religions, privileging humanity’s relationship with the divine, encourage arrogance. Yet even in that hard soil, poetry will find the language of compassionate fellowship with our fellow beings.
The seventeenth-century Christian mystic Henry Vaughan wrote:
So hills and valleys into singing break,
And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,
While active winds and streams both run and speak,
Yet stones are deep in admiration.
By admiration, Vaughan meant reverence for God’s sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. By admiration, I understand reverence for the infinite connectedness, the naturally sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. So we admit stones to our holy communion; so the stones may admit us to theirs.
RELATIONS
The Small Indian Pestle
at the Applegate House
Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year after year, by women’s hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that softly wore it down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.
Incense
for H.F.
The match-flame held to the half-inch block
catches, and I blow it out.
The flame grows and flashes
gold, then shrinks and almost dies
to a drop of spectral blue
that detaches, floats,
a wisp of fire in air, dances
high, a little higher, is gone.
Now
from the incense smouldering
sweet smoke of cedar rises
a while like memory.
Then only ashes.
Kitchen Spoons
New
My spoon of Spanish olive wood
from the Olive Pit in Corning,
Tehama County, California,
just off the I-5,
is light but has a good heft.
Short and well rounded,
the right size to stir with,
it’s at home in my hand.
Matte brown of olive meat,
dark streaks like olive skin,
its grain is clear and fluent.
The grain of a wood
is the language of the tree.
I oil the spoon with olive oil
and it tells me grey-green leaves,
brief fragrant blossom-foam,
tough life, deep roots, long years.
Spain that I have never seen.
California, and summer, summer.
Old
My plated steel mixing spoon
is from our first apartment,
on Holt Avenue in Macon,
Georgia, in 1954, the downstairs
of widow Killian’s house, furnished
with her furniture and kitchenware.
An ordinary heavy tablespoon,
plain, with a good balance,
the left side of the end of the bowl
misshapen, worn away
by decades, maybe a century,
of a right-handed person
mixing and beating with it.
First Mrs Killian, then me.
I liked it so well that when we moved
I asked her could I take it.
That old thing? My goodness, yes,
with a soft laugh,
take it if you want it, child.
Earthenware
Old clay pot
stained brown
cooked a lot
used to be
full of beans
in the oven
over and over
washed clean
time and again
baked clay
some day
had to crack
bones words
pot-shards
all go back
Kinship
Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.
Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.
Western Outlaws
I celebrate sagebrush,
scrub-oak, digger pine, juniper,
the despised and rejected
or grudgingly accepted
because nothing else grows here.
They’re the ones who won’t give in
to us, ornament our garden,
be furniture, or food,
and firewood only in a pinch
because nothing else grows here.
Theirs is the dour hardihood
of growing on serpentine and hardpan
with little or no water but what you steal
from your nextdoor neighbors,
so that nothing else grows here
I celebrate the gnarled cranky stem,
grey-green pungent leaf or scaly needle,
heavy cone, bitter berry, tiny blossom,
and the grand, rank smell of cat-spray,
since nothing else grows here.
Citizens of a hard and somewhat toxic land,
unsociable, undocile, willful,
they share nothing, yet they clothe
a naked indigent soil with life,
growing where nothing else grows, here.
The Canada Lynx
We know how to know and how to think,
how to exhibit what is known
to heaven’s bright ignorant eye,
how to be busy and to multiply.
He knows how to walk
into the trees alone not looking back,
so light on his soft feet he does not sink
into the snow. How to leave no track,
no sound, no shadow. How to be gone.
The One Thing Missing
Finally the fireflies came across the Rockies, drifting
on damp, soft breezes blowing westward
that lifted them over the salt and poisoned deserts
and the terrible white-toothed Sierra
to the quietness of California valleys
where I saw them in a dream from the verandah
of Kishamish, all the little airy fires
coming and going in the summer dusk nearby
and farther in the forests toward the mountain
glimmering in the darkness ever finer, fainter,
meadows of innumerable motes of silver.
CONTEMPLATIONS
In Ashland
Across the creek stood a tall complex screen
of walnut and honey-locust branch and leaf.
In a soft autumn sunrise without wind
my daughter in meditation on the deck
above the quietly loquacious creek
observed a multitude of small
yellow birds among the many leaves
coming and going quick as quick
into sight and out of sight again.
She said to me, they were
like thoughts moving in a mind,
the little birds among the many leaves.
My House
I have built a house in Time,
my home province. Up in the hills
not far from the city, it looks west
over fields, vineyards, wild lands
to the shore of the Eternal. Many years
went to building it as I wanted it to be,
the sleeping porches, the shady rooms,
the inner gardens with their fountains.
Above the front door, a word in a language
as yet unknown may perhaps mean Praise.
Windows are open to the summer air.
In winter rain patters in the courtyards
and in the basins of the fountains
and gathers to drip from the deep eaves.
Contemplation at McCoy Creek
Seeking the sense within the word, I guessed:
the temple. To witness fully, and be thus
the altar of the thing witnessed.
In shade beside the creek I contemplate
how the great waters coming from the heights
early this summer changed the watercourse.
The four big midstream boulders stayed in place.
The willows are some thriving and some dead,
rooted in, uprooted by the flood.
Over the valley in the radiant light
a raven takes its way from east to west;
shadow wings across the rimrock pass
as silent as the raven. Contemplation
shows me nothing discontinuous.
When I looked in the book I found:
Time is the temple—Time itself and Space—
observed, marked out, to make the sacred place
on the four-quartered sky, the inwalled ground.
To join in continuity, the mind
follows the water, shadows the birds,
observes the unmoved rock, the subtle flight.
Slowly, in silence, without words,
the altar of the place and hour is raised.
Self is lost, a sacrifice to praise,
and praise itself sinks into quietness.
Constellating
Mind draws the lines between the stars
that let the Eagle and the Swan
fly vast and bright and far
above the dark before the dawn.
Between two solitary minds
as far as Deneb from Altair,
love flings the unimaginable line
that marries fire to fire.
Hymn to Time
Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.
And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.
Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.