by Hilde Weisert

 

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. She’d 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 she’d 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,

she’d 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 she’d left us, abandoned for some acres and a book…

But I’ve re-read that year, now see what Yeats’s 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.