in the closed vale

The following is an epistola metrica composed in English in imitation of and playfully attributed to Francesco Petrarca. The appended sonnet is however genuine and translated from the Italian.)

“Petrarch here deliberately gives the impression that he is writing from Vaucluse soon after his brother Gherardo, the presumed addressee of the epistle, has joined the Carthusian order in 1343, perhaps in the winter of 1343-44. But at this time Petrarch was in Naples and then Parma. Parma is vividly mentioned in the poem, but other internal evidence strongly suggests that the letter is of later date, after 1348 at least. If the letter was written at Vaucluse, it would probably date from the period of his residence from 1351-53, after he had begun but not finished collecting his familiarum rerum libri. It is possible that Petrarch composed this letter, among others, with the intention of inserting it at a specific point in the chronology of collected letters and that it was not intended for Gherardo's eyes at all. The letter, however, is stylistically inferior to much of Petrarch's work, and he must have realized this, for it was never included in his finished work, and has only recently come to light, quite by accident. The original is in Latin, with a sonnet appended in Italian.”

in the closed vale, 

my sweet brother, the swallows are doing 
their silent work without complaint.
They are like you; wherever they are the people
are made happier, and everything becomes
much cleaner, as after April rains. It was
April, you know, when you chose to leave me here,
and all your friends, and the long nights of talking 
of glorious ancients, and of the fathers of 
sad spurned faith, and poor neglected Rome.
Even so was it April when my heart,
as you know, left me for another, never to return 
while I have life, so that every laurel
and every breeze might mock my emptiness,
and my soul hung like a green leaf before
the breath of crowds; my reputation was their toy
and their laughter blew me about upon the branch 
till I, brown and sere, fell upon the stream
and drifted here, deep in the shadows of my own
vale chiusa, my sweet brother, that is so like 
me, for its hidden spring weeps in winter 
and in summer, without end. But you
have been a comfort to me; whether here, 
nesting like a swallow in the cliff above
the east bank of the green and tumbling stream;
or far below, in the dusty-throated Babylon
on the plain: a counter to the madness
and corruption of that place, and a complement
of cheerful sufficiency in the other, always
helpful in my crazed efforts to placate
the nymphs of the vale, while honoring the muses
that always make them jealous, so that every 
meadow, every garden we built there
was swept away within the year; their fury
undiminished till complete; their victory 
leaving no sign of all that I -- that we 
had striven to plant or build to beautify
our memories of that place. And just as our gardens 
were swept away by the jealous nymphs, I feel
you too have been stolen -- by a jealous God. Please,
my sweet brother, bear with me, for I feel swollen 
with sorrows, but I mean no blasphemy! 
Does not the Father of Heaven himself say,
"I am a jealous God"? and he takes away 
the best, always, because the best is right 
for him to take. And I know that it is God
that has taken you, and not some gang of monks 
whose heaven is an inn, and whose God
is carried within the circle of their belts!
Rather, I know it is God because only the Father 
inspires the life of the silent men, whom you 
have been inspired to join with, not a rabble
of cenobitic share-alls, grubbing each
at the other's blanket under a common roof, 
breathing garlic in one another's ears
the whole night long, and begging for new wine 
or chasing women all the day, making
the name of Christ a joke to the common people,
so that when these beggars go out for alms,
a man may say to them, "What! You here again?" 
and call some poor fellow from the ditch
and give the alms to him instead, saying
"Here! In Mohammed's name, for he truly
is stronger than the Christ these fellows talk of!"
But your order, an eremetic city set
on a hill, is cleanly, faithful, quiet, and strong 
in the kindly works of our Lord. They and you
are so alike, how could it have been otherwise? 
Thus do I say, a jealous God took you,
for he could not bear this filthy world should hold
such a one another day. All
my friends are like you in this; the Lord loves 
them all too well; he takes them, one by one;
Remember Parma? It was there, you know,
by the bench I told you I'd had built,
that I, one day, was weeding among the bulbs,
near enough to the little brook to hear
its crystal song above the deeper roar
of the famous city so close by, and a darkness
came and stood upon that bridge, and I
looked up and into that darkness, as I have done 
so often at the mouth of the fountain here
(for I am not afraid of caves and darkness,
and love to walk at night, even when
there is no moon), and saw therein our friend, 
Giacomo Colonna, striding across
where that branch of the plane tree dips so closely 
to the pool, between the bench and the wall.
I greeted him, surprised, and most concerned,
for he was hurrying along, and had no company, 
and seemed as if he would not -- could not -- tarry.
He smiled, yet would not be embraced, and said 
(I will never forget his words then!),
"Don't you recall the awful storms along
the baleful crest of the high Pyrenees?
You hated them; so did I, and now
I am leaving those places forever: I am for Rome."
I wanted to go with him, but he was so stern 
it made me afraid to speak; it was clear
that he would not have me go, so I looked
closely on him, to fix his beloved features 
forever in my mind, and it was then
that I saw how pale he was, and knew that he
was dead. I have said elsewhere that this 
was in a dream, but already I am not so sure. 
Colonna died that very day, you know;
So I feel I really saw him. But you I never
see now, asleep or awake, but only remember. 
Even as I write, I remember,
and it seems as though I might shape you 
with my words. I see you as you were 
when we braved the craggy slopes so high
above this shady valley, when we were young. 
You took the straight path as it lay before you, 
up and over all obstacles,
no matter how fearsome, and never stopped till you 
had reached the appointed goal. You were then
just as you are; that is why God loves you
best! While I, wandering this way and that, 
sought to take a path that looked the easiest, 
but found to my chagrin it turned downhill.
I was lucky to reach the top at all,
but I did! I did! You cannot deny it, brother. 
And it was I who brought our precious saint,
Augustinus, with us all that way.
The clouds were lower down, with the late sun 
bright on their broad fleecy backs, and the Alps
shone so far to the south, between us and 
our father-country Italia, and the sea.
At our feet, so near it seemed a dream,
the Rhone, gleaming, in its bed of stones.
All this was first yours, but also mine,
and I brought forth Augustinus from my breast
and gave his benediction to that day:
that men wander through the world gazing 
upon the high mountain tops, the great
ocean waves and deeply springing rivers, 
and the slow-turning canopy of bright stars, 
yet never think to look upon their souls.
This you have done; but this, I fear, I fear
to do, or rather wish to do but always turn 
just as I reach the heavenly door, to seek
some easier-seeming path, some flowered way, 
and always find, as on that peak, my way 
leading down, toward some darkened place.
God be my witness, I often try to turn
there on my pleasant-seeming path, back
to the place where last I saw the door, but it
by then is gone, and nothing there I find
but a smooth expanse of bramble-covered wall. 
And now you write to me and say the things
I have so often told myself, troubled,
as you must believe, beyond the common run 
of men in sin! Brother, I have even
made a small book wherein I keep
my lapses and successes; already once 
I kept myself safe for two years
and seven months; now, it is true, the priest 
to whom I go for confession is kept busy, 
but I trust the Lord will give me strength ...

In living alone, as you know by now, there is 
much to be gained. I have here the two 
faithful servants and the dog, and visitors
come, but not too often, and the people
of the valley seem to regard me as their judge, 
but I do have, as you have seen for yourself,
a space to myself within the walls of my
small house, south windowed, and endowed with one 
extravagant thing: a good scriptorium.
Nearby are the books, my closest friends: they 
(Virgil, Cicero, Livy, and the rest,
and Augustinus, my advisor and true 
confessor) open continually their great treasures 
to me, and through me, to all the world beside. 
Do you not rise and pray in the midst of night
that all the saints may bless the wide world? 
And the scripture says, "the heartfelt prayer 
of a righteous man effecteth much." So too
you pour out the treasures of heaven on 
the earth, as I unearth and bring to light 
the gold and silver of the past! Brother,
my work is not so unlike yours...except, 
of course, that I am able to put my name 
on all my little productions! I do admit,
to you, now, dear heart, that I desire 
greatly to see my name remembered -- God 
forgive this! I see two thirsts in me: the one
to live forever in a name above
the common herd; the other, to nurse along 
the hurt that blind boy gave me, years ago
when I was least prepared to defend myself. 
Yes, I am still thirsting! Only those
who have never seen her cannot understand!
The light foliage of her hair, the dark 
contrasting brows...the all-destroying twin 
suns burning in her face, that should
have killed me long since, but Fortune
preserved me, for they have been oft averted; 
while my own eyes looked everywhere that she, 
I knew, was not, and found her in stones and winds 
and even among the roots of trees along
the storm-scoured banks of the river Sorgue.
I have sat upon the grass at midnight
and rained tears on my own breast, because 
the stars, so like her in their shining,
wheeled by beyond my reach, 
as thoughtless of my suffering as she! And it seems
to me now these two thirsts are one
in some way: that as the light-limbed goddess 
vanished, and in her place stood rooted forever 
the dreamless, unapproachable laurel tree,
Apollo might have lifted a storm-stolen 
branch with which to weave himself a crown 
for remembrance; so with me, for to console
myself that tears and smiles, and even my poems 
moved not one, though they move all others,
I might, somewhere along the Appian Way,
pluck some branch of the very tree of hate 
and, weaving it round my brows, make it 
forever after my crown of love. The Africa
will earn me this, though it is already mine,
but I have begun, my brother, to gather the scattered l
eaves that the winds of Love have brought me here
and elsewhere -- if it must be pain, then let the pain 
be famed! Famed in France and Italy, and even
as far as the shores walked by Scipio, or
the mountains beyond the sacred land where Christ 
walked along the Galilean strand.
Is this dreaming? Perhaps I have dreamed it all;
some will say: "this man invents everything 
he says has happened to him"; but, brother, 
you know I speak to you sincerely from the heart,
this heart that is not mine but another's,
for you yourself once loved truly one
who now has gone beyond you and the grave.

What is life? They, the crowd, never
ask, but I have asked, all my days,
and now I tell you what even the ancients most
desired to know, yet never found: this life
of man is a kind of dreaming, whether awake 
or sleeping. He rises in a dream, and dresses
with dreaming hands. In the field he dreams of grain, 
and at his nets he catches silver dreams.
He looks but cannot see, and hears but nothing
hears, as our blessed Lord tells us; there is 
nothing between a man and a man but words, 
and our words are all, and only, stuff of dreams.

I make myself in books, brother, because 
I want my dreams to go on living yet, 
and I know no other way. Is this so evil?
I will tell you more when I come, dear brother, 
for I desire much to see you, and
observe the true monastic rule, some days
or even weeks, if the Abbott will allow.
I close by appending a copy of the first leaf 
that drifted from my pain, back
to my door here in the wild, so that I might 
weave it in the crown that now I wear
here in the closed vale, where it is always
winter in my soul without you, dear brother. 

Apollo! If yet lives the beautiful desire
that set you aflame by the Thessalian coast, 
and if your love for the blonde tresses
amid wheeling years, has not found oblivion 

through slow ice and sharp, wicked time 
enduring while your face yet seems obscured,
protect this loved and sacred foliage
by which first you and then I were caught; 

and by the virtue of that hope of love
that kept you up despite your life of pain, 
completely clear the air of all falsehood;
we may then both see a wonder in the same way:

seated, our lady, upon the grass 
making, with her arms, her own shade.

eighty-six, he

                                 stands in his garden and tells
of the journey from Ohio that never ended,
not even with the case of sun-ripe peaches.

"The Lord sure has blessed me. Oh, yes.
See how the apricots grow, and the pears, 
and the oranges? And these now, the farmers

hate them, but I don't, I water them;
the Spaniards, when they landed, looked for a sign 
and the loaves and the fish of our Lord

were seen in the flowers of the vine."
He walks in the shade of the live oaks,
talks of Kentucky, of boyhood and manhood,

Of the girl that he married, who fell
years later, and broke something inside, 
and the child they had found, and the land,

and the tall pines he tended, that stand 
where the wind-driven lake once rippled 
and broke on the crystalline sand.

we are that kind

of town-bred country folk 
that say, when asked, oh yes, we do keep stock,
then easily turn the subject to one side.

Some friend persists; she wants to know the worst. 
"If you," I tell her, "want to do this, under-
stand: sometimes you'll have to take the place

of God." Our ducks, good Khaki Campbells, come 
by mail in lots of twenty, every second
year. When small, they're all engaging, all 

underfoot, following our steps with small 
heartwarming cries. But half are drakes. In high
summer I don my serious face, and tie

with care my long blue apron on. I go
to the barn, butcher's block in hand, and like
the surgeon spread my choicest tools nearby. 

The axe is first, and as its blade rises,
I feel that panic rising in the eyes
hidden beneath my unrelenting hand.

Emily,

you almost kiss
the bed with your small lips,
sipping night in these

surprising infant gasps 
that hold a little life in you 
for seconds at a time.

You sleep well, unless
the hour is cool, and then you 
hunt for arms, and nose

to cold nose, tell silently
all you know into our beating hearts 
until dawn comes.

I listen in fear, 
for I suspect
that when I learn

what you are saying here between 
your parents in the dark,
I will weep and mourn

our having brought you here 
without your wings.

took a piece of bread

                                and wandered: down 
to pools, to streams; examined the undersides
of clouds, swimming on their slow grey backs

in still water. These and the spring-bare trees, 
and the winter teat of thawed leaf mould, 
and the new birds on old nests, breast-brave,

egg-rich and cocksure, and the first fawn 
mothered in close twilit last-year's bracken
say the old songs in the blood (again), the stories

and the root-songs sung to the wordless waters 
passing these, through and among, to the sea: 
we all do this, take breath and be not afraid.

How we came to Stony Run Farm

She sell books from nine to six. They are good books, 
well bound, well written, colorful
to the eye, and children love them, but
the town is poor. She sits waiting for hours
for one grandmother to come in and buy one book 
for a favored grandchild. The owner of the store
is her friend; she cannot leave her just now, 
but the store, she knows, is not her place in life. All
she has ever wanted is to farm: at evening,
when the dinner things are cleared, and the hot sun 
drops behind the cottonwood, she farms.
Food for the ducks, and soapy water for broccoli;
old lettuce gone to seed comes out; the hay is rearranged, and 
fall peas go in. She stops only to hear the geese pass overhead,
then bends among her plants until the stars, first one 
and then another, leap and are caught in the hair of 
approaching night, so like her hair.
She comes in, soiled to the elbows, leans against the table, 
extending an open palm. "Look,"
she says, her eyes afire. "Marigold seeds!"
 
we went to see the place
in Walterville. Before we had even seen the house, the neighbor,
a man of some seventy years, bent with woods work,
stopped to chat. "The house isn't much, but the soil is good. 
Oh, it has some Scotch broom, I know,
on the pasture, but you can get ahead of that
if you keep after it. I helped the last folks with their fence, 
but they wanted the gate right here, where the tractor 
couldn't get in. They'd no sense."
We asked why no fence between his place
and "ours." "Oh, I don't need a fence. Don't want your apples, 
and you're welcome to mine."
The sort of thing we'd hoped. We walked 
over the pasture till we reached the 
incense cedars, each one five feet thick, and 
found a hanging branch worn smooth 
by generations of children's swinging. 
Good, and the valley here was wide, with 
mountains stretching east and west,
and sunshine access on short winter days. 
But the house wouldn't do; bedrooms dark and tiny, 
with telltale smell throughout
of dry rot underneath. Desire for land sets one dreaming. 
One acre, three acres-- not enough to farm, but who can farm
with these prices? It becomes a privilege
just to set out onions, and a cow
is not mere luxury, but even a kind of madness
to actually hope for. We have cross fenced
our high-taxed valleys so that to walk straight 
for five minutes can't be done, and all
the while buying our produce from five hundred miles away, 
where the tractors have as many wheels as your freeway rig. 
I want to put my hands into the ground 
and make it yield enough to make 
my children grow, and not grow poor in the process. 
We drove home, and quarreled along the way 
about land, the way people do 
who have gone to see not only what they could not 
have afforded, but ought not to have desired. 
The ducks were glad to see us; 
she watered them, and I picked tomatoes. 
We kissed and made up,
and lay awake in our small suburban house 
beneath the wheeling moon and stars. 
Why is it, I wondered then and wonder now, that no one
ever seems to know when they have enough? 

When sleep came, there was a vivid dream.
I met again the old man with no fence,
and saw him pointing to the earth. "This
was river bottom in here not too long ago,"
I heard him say. "When we drilled down forty
feet, we hit a driftwood tree, even though
the river now is half a mile away." 
He opened up the earth somehow, and showed me the tree,
still caught amid the smooth and rounded stones 
deep beneath the topsoil, which now I saw
was dark and rich, as he had said it was.
I reached to touch the soil, and awoke.
The northbound train was rumbling by the house, 
carrying produce from industrial farms,
and I was drenched in sweat, and found the moon 
had drifted far across the window to the west.

She spreads the brightly colored packets 
round the table, and speaks of hope.
I lift a flat paper envelope, with its picture
of a perfect beet, and shake it like a rattle, "Hey-ya!" 
She sits across, nodding and smiling, and hefts 
a half pound of peas, offering its promise,
like incense, to the gods of our little life.
We've drawn out and made domains of the gardens. 
The east one, very small, is on the highest ground,
and drains superbly. It is all hers. She loves
to dig in early spring and late in the fall, 
coaxing brassicas, beets, chard, sugar snap peas
to grow in long succession through the year.
The south garden, sheltered from hot winds,
but prone to wetness, is mine. I've raised my beds
high as I can pile them, tossed away stones, and spread out 
golden chunks of bales of straw, redolent of the ducks 
who've nested on them. Here tomatoes and sunflowers, 
limas and vine crops broil in the sun by day and rest by night.
The north garden, on the only flat, gets sun
but stays colder longer. It is the largest,
so we share it, and here we fight. I look 
for long rows of corn and beans, and always more
tomatoes. She tries new things I can't pronounce, 
and seeks the permanence of berries: 
raspberry is her favorite thing under the sun, I dunno.
We fight over water, when to use, how much. 
We fight over planting depth, shade, what
to harvest when, and how long to blanch beans.
We fight all the way to the bedroom; its north window 
opens onto the windswept beds. In plain view
the rustling rainbow windsock
presides there over the rustling corn, and our fighting 
turns to sudden loving. We hold each other's 
life, like seed, in careworn hands,
and sleep, like seed, until the sun's return.

It was not enough
to see, in colorful magazines and costly books, the country homes
and garden walks that men and women build
who have only ready money and a few ideas. 
I too wished to sit sometimes drinking
tea by firelight, admiring a work of beams
and plaster, hanging fruit and herbs, good books 
liberally strewn, and a sleeping cat (or two).
To which end we labored without cash, days
and even nights with saw and chisel, scraper, 
hammer, knife, and plane, using such wood, 
such paint, and even such nails as came to hand.
Our friends and friends of our friends remembered us 
when their surplus had to go, and I went forth
with battered truck and pry bar, gathering decks
and fences long past keeping for those without 
the patience to rebuild. We have learned
to watch for stones of certain weight and shape;
to lay a course of ninety-year-old brick,
to scrap a window sash to get the glass
for cutting, and to fill the oddly angled wall
with joint compound. When supplies ran short,
we turned to the acre of ground, and forked 
and spaded, laying out long beds, piling them with straw,
covering the paths with leaves of oak, maple
 and ash. Seeds bought last year at sale,
ten cents a pack, were sown with trembling hand.
They all did well: the new shelves are fat
with harvest. This all has come late to me. Now
we do sit in chimney-corner like the English cottage-
keepers, tea in hand and cat in lap, ready to peruse 
an act of Winter's Tale or book of Faerie Queene, only to find
our eyes no longer focus on ten-point type
for an act or a book at a time. I call the youngest child; 
she reads to me from Sendak, or
our mutual favorite, Potter, haltingly, but with a will, 
improving as she goes. As she sounds out words, I watch a knot
of fir collapse into the coals, and fall
to long, light sleep, with not unpleasant dreams.