Written by
Robert Francis |
A wind's word, the Hebrew Hallelujah.
I wonder they never gave it to a boy
(Hal for short) boy with wind-wild hair.
It means Praise God, as well it should since praise
Is what God's for.
Why didn't they call my father
Hallelujah instead of Ebenezer?
Eben, of course, but christened Ebenezer,
Product of Nova Scotia (hallelujah).
Daniel, a country doctor, was his father
And my father his tenth and final boy.
A baby and last, he had a baby's praise:
Red petticoats, red cheeks, and crow-black hair.
A boy has little to say about his hair
And little about a name like Ebenezer
Except that you can shorten either.
Praise
God for that, for that shout Hallelujah.
Shout Hallelujah for everything a boy
Can be that is not his father or grandfather.
But then, before you know it, he is a father
Too and passing on his brand of hair
To one more perfectly defenseless boy,
Dubbing him John or James or Ebenezer
But never, so far as I know, Hallelujah,
As if God didn't need quite that much praise.
But what I'm coming to - Could I ever praise
My father half enough for being a father
Who let me be myself? Sing Hallelujah.
Preacher he was with a prophet's head of hair
And what but a prophet's name was Ebenezer,
However little I guessed it as a boy?
Outlandish names of course are never a boy's
Choice.
And it takes some time to learn to praise.
Stone of Help is the meaning of Ebenezer.
Stone of Help - what fitter name for my father?
Always the Stone of Help however his hair
Might graduate from black to Hallelujah.
Such is the old drama of boy and father.
Praise from a grayhead now with thinning hair.
Sing Ebenezer, Robert, sing Hallelujah!
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Written by
Robert Francis |
Lingo of birds was easier than lingo of peasants-
they were elusive, though, the birds, for excellent reasons.
He thought of Virgil, Virgil who wasn't there to chat with.
History he never forgave for letting Latin
lapse into Italian, a renegade jabbering
musical enough but not enough to call music
So he conversed with stones, imperial and papal.
Even the preposterous popes he could condone
a moment for the clean arrogance of their inscriptions.
He asked the Italians only to leave him in the past
alone, but this was what they emphatically never did.
Being the present, they never ceased to celebrate it.
Something was always brushing him on the street, satyr
or saint-impossible to say which the more foreign.
At home he was called touchy; here he knew he was.
Impossible to say.
The dazzling nude with sex
lovingly displayed like carven fruit, the black
robe sweeping a holy and unholy dust.
Always the flesh whether to lacerate of kiss-
Conspiracy of fauns and clerics smiling back
and forth at each other acquiescently through leaves.
Caught between wan monastic mountains wearing the tonsure
and the all-siren, ever-dimpling sea, he saw
(how could he fail?) at heart geography to blame.
So home to Concord where (as he might have known he would)
he found the Italy he wanted to remember.
Why had he sailed if not for the savour of returning?
An Italy distilled of all extreme, conflict,
Collusion-an Italy without the Italians-
in whose green context he could con again his Virgil.
In cedar he read cypress, in the wild apple, olive.
His hills would stand up favorably to the hills of Rome.
His arrowheads could hold their own with are Etruscan.
And Walden clearly was his Mediterranean
whose infinite colors were his picture gallery.
How far his little boat transported him-how far.
He coughed discreetly and we likewise coughed;
we waited and we heard him clear his throat.
How to be perfect prisoners of the past
this was the thing but now he too is past.
Shall we go sit beside the Mississippi
and watch the riffraft driftwood floating by?
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Written by
Robert Francis |
backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk
underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow
woodsmoke cowbarn honeysuckle woodpile
sawhorse bucksaw outhouse wellsweep
backdoor flagstone bulkhead buttermilk
candlestick ragrug firedog brownbread
hilltop outcrop cowbell buttercup
whetstone thunderstorm pitchfork steeplebush
gristmill millstone cornmeal waterwheel
watercress buckwheat firefly jewelweed
gravestone groundpine windbreak bedrock
weathercock snowfall starlight cockcrow
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Written by
Robert Francis |
Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.
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Written by
Robert Francis |
Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up.
Come any hour
Of night.
Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch.
Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look.
Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see.
Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.
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Written by
Robert Francis |
How lush, how loose, the uninhibited squash is.
If ever hearts (and these immoderate leaves
Are vegetable hearts) were worn on sleeves,
The squash's are.
In green the squash vine gushes.
The flowers are cornucopias of summer,
Briefly exuberant and cheaply golden.
And if they make a show of being hidden,
Are open promiscuously to every comer.
Let the squash be what it was doomed to be
By the old Gardener with the shrewd green thumb.
Let it expand and sprawl, defenceless, dumb.
But let me be the fiber-disciplined tree
Whose leaf (with something to say in wind) is small,
Reduced to the ingenuity of a green splinter
Sharp to defy or fraternize with winter,
Or if not that, prepared in fall to fall.
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Written by
Robert Francis |
The winter apples have been picked, the garden turned.
Rain and wind have picked the maple leaves and gone.
The last of them now bank the house or have been burned.
None are left upon the trees or on the lawn.
Green and tall as ever it grew in spring the grass
Grows not too tall, will not be cut again this year.
Geraniums in bloom behind the windowglass
Are safe.
Fall has fallen yet winter is not yet here.
How warm the late November sun although how wan.
The white house stands a symbol of fulfillment there,
Housing one old woman, a cat, and one old man
After abundance but before the earth is bare.
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Written by
Robert Francis |
Words of a poem should be glass
But glass so simple-subtle its shape
Is nothing but the shape of what it holds.
A glass spun for itself is empty,
Brittle, at best Venetian trinket.
Embossed glass hides the poem of its absence.
Words should be looked through, should be windows.
The best word were invisible.
The poem is the thing the poet thinks.
If the impossible were not,
And if the glass, only the glass,
Could be removed, the poem would remain.
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Written by
Robert Francis |
The first speaker said
Fear fire.
Fear furnaces
Incinerators, the city dump
The faint scratch of a match.
The second speaker said
Fear water.
Fear drenching rain
Drizzle, oceans, puddles, a damp
Day and the flush toilet.
The third speaker said
Fear wind.
And it needn't be
A hurricane.
Drafts, open
Windows, electric fans.
The fourth speaker said
Fear knives.
Fear any sharp
Thing, machine, shears
Scissors, lawnmowers.
The fifth speaker said
Hope.
Hope for the best
A smooth folder in a steel file.
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Written by
Robert Francis |
Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
in sun, and I am one.
Such merriment and such sobriety--
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk--
was this not always my true style?
Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds.
Can you mistake us?
To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together--for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.
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