My friend went back to reading Yeats the year
she went back to the farm, claiming the land
as land, leaving a smart, well-dressed career
for dirt. This was her home. Shed planned
how what had grown tobacco now would bear
(a mile below where grinding, snorting bands
of bulldozers pawed the earth and air grew thick)
the fruit suburbanites would pay to pick.
Her father planned it too their dream. The pair
puttered the rainy fields in a rusty Jeep
and saw green waves of grass turn blue, the air
clear, bushes bloom, and vines run deep.
But they were only up to planting, bushes bare
and squat, when he died buried on the steep
ancestral hill. She went on, day labor like a prayer
and every midnight climbing on the winding stair
to Yeats Yeats all she read, night in, night out.
Is reading only Yeats the same as being mad? Abstract,
we feared shed come to grief, wandering about
like Jane or Aengus, Gaelic fire in her head. We ransacked
our shelves First Frost, then Wilbur as the antidote,
as beautiful, as deep, but calm. With patient Southern tact,
shed smile, wait a week, and hand him back; devote
herself anew to Willie B, taking half of what he wrote
by heart, Brown Penny to Cold Heaven. Always finding more.
We thought shed left us, abandoned for some acres and a book
But Ive re-read that year, now see what Yeatss spell was for:
Working the same hard ground and finding more was what it took.
Stitching intellect to intellect, and soul to soul, ancestral form
would rise and bloom from rows worked, and worked again. Look:
Children in the fields, berry baskets in their arms.
Yeats saved my friend that year, and my friend saved the farm.