From The Wild Braid: A Poet reflects on a Century in the Garden by Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine (New York and London 2005)

The Snakes of September

All summer I heard them

rustling in the shrubbery,

outracing me from tier

to tier in my garden,

a whisper among the viburnums,

a signal flashed from the hedgerow,

a shadow pulsing

in the barberry thicket.

Now that the nights are chill

and the annuals spent,

I should have thought them gone,

in a torpor of blood

slipped to the nether world

before the sickle frost.

Not so. In the deceptive balm

of noon, as if defiant of the curse

that spoiled another garden,

these two appear on show

through a narrow slit

in the dense green brocade

of a north-country spruce,

dangling head-down entwined

in a brazen love-knot.

I put out my hand and stroke

the fine, dry grit of their skins.

After all,

we are partners in this land,

co-signers of a covenant.

At my touch the wild

braid of creation

trembles.

…

Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature’s tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame your garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.

In a poem, the danger is obvious; there is natural idiom and then there is domesticated language. The difference is apparent immediately when you sense everything has been subjugated, that the poet has tamed the language and the thought process that flows into a poem until it maintains a principle of order but nothing remains to give the poem its tang, its liberty, its force. Once the poem starts flowing, the poem must not try to dictate every syllable.

…

There were no paths; I had to create the paths. There was a question of where they should be…I wanted a winding path to the steps in front of the house instead of a straight path. I avoided straight lines as much as possible.

One of my principles is never to explain what a poem is about. That’s a straight line to me. The path to the understanding of the poem is for me always circuitous, it’s a winding path, and I think of a the garden as being a winding garden…

Art conceals and reveals at the same time. Part of the concept of the garden is that you never see it all at once. this I got from my understanding of Japanese gardens, that the way to see a garden is by circling it, by walking through it.

…

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.

Words plucked out of the air

some forty years ago

when I was wild with love

and torn almost in two

scatter like leaves this night

of whistling wind and rain.

It is my heart that’s late

it is my song that’s flown.

Outdoors all afternoon

under a gunmetal sky

staking my garden down,

I kneeled to the crickets trilling

underfoot as if about

to burst from their crusty shells;

and like a child again

marveled to hear so clear

and brave a music pour

from such a small machine.

What makes the engine go?

Desire, desire, desire.

The longing for the dance

stirs in the buried life.

One season only,

and it’s done.

So let the battered old willow

thrash against the windowpanes

and the house timbers creak.

Darling, do you remember

the man you married? Touch me,

remind me who I am.

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose

from its mooring, under

the screaking of the gulls,

he tried at first to wave

to his dear ones on shore,

but in the rolling fog

they had already lost their faces.

Too tired even to choose

between jumping and calling,

somehow he felt absolved and free

of his burdens, those mottoes

stamped on his name-tag:

conscience, ambition, and all

that caring.

He was content to lie down

with the family ghosts

in the slop of his cradle,

buffeted by the storm,

endlessly drifting.

Peace! Peace!

To be rocked by the Infinite!

As if it didn’t matter

which way was home;

as if he didn’t know

he loved the earth so much

he wanted to stay forever.