Galway Kinnell was the second Vermont State Poet (the first, Robert Frost, held the position until his death, after which the post remained vacant until Kinnell’s appointment). Kinnell is a major presence on the American poetry scene as author, teacher, and public figure. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927, he attended Princeton University and the University of Rochester. He divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. According a statement by Kinnell at Salon.com, “There's not a specific something I'm aiming for, but there is something that's almost unspeakable and poems are efforts to speak it bit by bit, like a burden than has to be laid down piece by piece, that can't be just thrown off.”

That Silent Evening

I will go back to that silent evening when we lay together and talked in silent voices, while outside slow lumps of soft snow fell, hushing as they got near the ground, with a fire in the room, in which centuries of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up, without a crackle, into morning light.
Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.
When we got home we turned and looked back at our tracks twining out of the woods, where the branches we brushed against let fall puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence, like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch among the trees, which is the sound that dies inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge hits it off center telling everything inside it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome, and yet also--how can we know this?--happy!
in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow, not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing not to meet until heaven, but here and there treading slubby kissing stops, our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch.
So many things that happen here are really little more, if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths, are almost ready, already, to bandage the one whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches from this moment to that. Then I will go back to that silent evening, when the past just managed to overlap the future, if only by a trace, and the light doubles and casts through the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.

Contents

Author’s Note xi

FROM What a Kingdom It Was 1960 First Song 3 For William Carlos Williams 4 Freedom, New Hampshire 5 The Supper After the Last 9 The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World 12

FROM Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock 1964 The River That Is East 29 For Robert Frost 31 Poem of Night 35 Middle of the Way 37 Ruins Under the Stars 39 Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock 41

FROM Body Rags 1968 Another Night in the Ruins 47 Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond 49 The Burn 51 The Fly 52 The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students 53 How Many Nights 54 The Porcupine 55 The Bear 59 FROM The Book of Nightmares 1971 Under the Maud Moon 65 The Hen Flower 70 The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible 74 Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight 79 Lastness 83

FROM Mortal Acts, Mortal Words 1980 Fergus Falling 91 After Making Love We Hear Footsteps 93 Saint Francis and the Sow 94 Wait 95 Daybreak 96 Blackberry Eating 97 Kissing the Toad 98 On the Tennis Court at Night 99 The Last Hiding Places of Snow 101 Looking at Your Face 105 Fisherman 106 52 Oswald Street 107 A Milk Bottle 108

FROM The Past 1985 The Road Between Here and There 113 Conception 115 The Sow Piglet’s Escapes 116 The Olive Wood Fire 117 The Frog Pond 118 Prayer 120 Fire in Luna Park 121 Cemetery Angels 122 On the Oregon Coast 123 First Day of the Future 124 The Fundamental Project of Technology 125 The Waking 127 That Silent Evening 130

FROM When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 1990 The Tragedy of Bricks 133 The Cat 135 Oatmeal 137 The Perch 139 The Room 141 Last Gods 142 Farewell 144 When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 146

FROM Imperfect Thirst 1994 My Mother’s R & R 159 The Man in the Chair 160 The Cellist 162 Running on Silk 164 The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson 166 Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West 168 Sheffield Ghazal 5: Passing the Cemetery 169 Parkinson’s Disease 170 Rapture 172 Flies 174 Neverland 178

Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years--from WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS to THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES to THREEE BOOKS--Galway Kinnell has been enriching American poetry, not only by his poems but also by his teaching and his powerful public readings.

From What a Kingdom It Was 1960

First Song

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy After an afternoon of carting dung Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall And he began to hear the pond frogs all Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall Of Illinois, and from the fields two small Boys came bearing cornstalk violins And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins And the three sat there scraping of their joy.

It was now fine music the frogs and the boys Did in the towering Illinois twilight make And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Galway Kinnell

Imprint: Mariner Books
Distributor: Houghton Mifflin Company
Publication Date: 09-13-2001
Pages: 192
Measurements: 9.00in X 6.00in X 0.50in X 0.60lb