The poem
I used to imagine him coming from his house, like Merlin strolling with important gestures through the garden where everything grows so thickly, where birds sing, little snakes lie on the boughs, thinking of nothing but their own good lives, where petals float upward, their colors exploding, and trees open their moist pages of thunder - it has happened every summer for years.
But now I know more about the great wheel of growth, and decay, and rebirth, and know my vision for a falsehood. Now I see him coming from the house - I see him on his knees, cutting away the diseased, the superfluous, coaxing the new, know that the hour of fulfillment is buried in years of patience - yet willing to labor like that on the mortal wheel.
Oh, what good it does the heart to know it isn't magic! Like the human child I am I rush to imitate - I watch him as he bends among the leaves and vines to hook some weed or other; I think of him there raking and trimming, stirring up those sheets of fire between the smothering weights of earth, the wild and shapeless air.
Another amazing poem. To see "the man" and not just the public works of the man. The process of age and disease are slowly introduced, and Oliver manages to pay respects (I guess to someone she knew and cared about) in the most beautiful manner. I read that Kunitz had a 100 acre herb farm in Connecticut, which was destroyed when a tornado blew through it. The same article quoted him as saying, "one of the rituals of working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil."