"You don't see the garden as a whole from any point, but you begin to know it by making a tour around it. Then it becomes a garden in the mind, and you become the instrument that defines it." So the poet writes. He has made his apartment, at first glance, a garden of gardens. Plants in their clay pots on the window ledge have grown up high, so that the light as it steers through their leaves picks up a splash of green. Paintings hang everywhere there is space for them, like wildflowers twined in a fence, and in the hallway framed black-and-white photos of the poet's friends, most of them authors and artists themselves, spread in meandering, ivy-like rows up the wall. Enormous floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the study and bedroom are more visual mosaic than storage space, yet every bright, slim spine holds tight its bloom of pages, and each page its poem.

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.

He sits in front of the window, cutting a small figure in a large chair, at such a distance from the door that we might well have entered the throne room of an aged king. And adding to the pomp of the occasion, we have come with potted flowers held in front of us like candles, crocuses and grape hyacinths, tokens of the spring that has taken root outside. But as we sit down beside the man and he examines our offerings, one at a time, the absurd ceremony of the scene disappears altogether. The veins in his hands are navy blue and fork decisively around his knuckles like rivers. The skin on his wrist is freckled and mottled and wrinkled in shallow ridges, as though rain had carved them out of a hillside. The introduction to his Collected Poems ends, "I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through it and see the world." We thought to bring nature to the artist, but we had only brought nature back to nature. He closes his eyes to smell the flowers, opens them slowly, nods his approval.

A few months shy of his hundred-and-first birthday, Stanley Kunitz sits at the head of the table of American letters, and not by the right of seniority alone. A Harvard graduate in the class of 1927, he soon had poems published in The Dial , edited at that time by Marianne Moore. By 1930 he had published his first book of poetry, Intellectual Things ; his second, Passport to the War , came out in 1944, while he was digging latrines for the army as a "non-affiliated pacifist, with moral scruples against bearing arms." On his return from the war he got a job teaching poetry, in large measure due to a friendship with Theodore Roethke. Though he has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and is a former Poet Laureate, no number of honors vaulted him to stardom, even within the relatively insular world of American poetry. Never in the limelight, never associated with a certain school of art, never especially prolific, he and his biography are as soft-spoken as his poems, yet its arc sweeps out more than one might think possible in a single life. Nor is it finished: when he was 99 he published a new book, The Wild Braid , with the help of his companion and assistant, Genine Lentine, a poet herself. It contains reflections on his life as a gardener, which, he explains, is not terribly different from one's life as a poet. He returns each summer to Provincetown , Massachusetts , where he owns a sea-side home and where the garden he planted continues to flourish.

Along with flowers we have brought questions, questions clumped in notebooks like pebbles in a pouch: Why do you say that being a poet in this age is itself a political action? What do you mean when you say the tragic sense cannot exist without tradition and structure? Have you written for different people at different times in your life? But as we look at him, such things lose their urgency. A copy of Hopkins ' poems lies on a nearby table, and we ask if he will read to us. While certain capacities have dwindled—he does not walk well, and a pen is clumsy in his practiced fingers—he still reads wonderfully, and seems to enjoy speaking poems out loud. He raises the book high up in front of him, as though he were about to drink from it, and tilts it from side to side so that the light catches the page at just the right angle.

.......Glory be to God for dappled things—
..........For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
.............For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

The words come slowly, singly, even. In a 1977 interview he said, "I write mostly in trimeters, since my natural span of breath seems to be three beats. It seems to me so natural now that I scarcely ever feel the need for a longer line. Sometimes I keep a little clock going when people talk to me and I notice they too are speaking in trimeters. Back in the Elizabethan Age I'd have heard pentameters." Now history seems to be picking up speed, for he has lungs enough to pronounce only two or three syllables at a time.

Yet the words lose none of their power, for he reads with his entire body: every new note he sounds is accompanied by a corresponding shift in his chair, a bend in the shoulders, a tilt of the head, a bob of the foot in the air. Just before the last line of every poem, he shuts the book and swivels to look one of us in the eye, chanting it directly at us, and smiling. When he reaches the word "buckle" in Hopkins ' "The Windhover," a moment of nearly unpronounceable crescendo, he does not, perhaps cannot, bring himself to say it for nearly ten seconds, his mouth arrested around the tight-lipped shape of the letter B.

.Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
...Buckle!

Suspended in the silent hollow of that turn, we are not waiting for him to finish the poem so much as for the music to resolve itself. As he reads out all the elements that bond within the body of Hopkins ' hawk, the poem's own separate selves—the corporeal and the windy, its wing and its heart—seem to buckle together in this frail man in front of us.

To an even greater degree in his own work, the poet can hardly be separated from the poems he reads to us. Years ago he wrote, "When I read the late work of Hardy or Yeats, I get the distinct impression that the life of the poet is already passing into his poems"; and more directly in "Passing Through," which ends,

.....................Maybe
it's time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I'm passing through a phase:
gradually I'm changing to a word.

His memory, though it seems to have lost nothing, no longer yields up its fruit so readily. Open-ended questions, even such as "What poets meant the most to you when you were in school?" set him pondering in long silences, and when he answers it is to say, "Oh, but there are so many," as if he could not choose a few without denying the others' influence, aware that his memory can paint only an incomplete portrait. His imaginative experiences supplement those he does not remember: when asked about his affinity for the Russian poets, he recalls meeting Osip Mandelstam, who died in a labor camp in 1938, and hearing him read "Tristia," a poem which he himself has translated:

.......I have made myself an expert in farewells
.......by studying laments, the nightfall of a woman's hair.
.......Oxen chew their cud; anticipation lags;
.......it is the town's last restless hour;
.......and I praise that ritual night when the cocks crowed
.......and eyelids, heavy with the griefs that pass,
.......opened to the light, while her weeping flowed
.......into the sound of the Muses singing.

"He had a ruddy face, a clear voice. He read beautifully," he said of the Russian poet, though Kunitz never traveled to the Soviet Union until the 1960's. He describes Anna Akhmatova—"She had a great deal of beauty," he says, though in previous interviews he has lamented the fact that he never met the woman. In someone else, these would be called delusions, but after hearing those lines spoken for a dead man, who will deny that the two were acquainted, and that the poet had a ruddy face, a clear voice, a great deal of beauty? The only memory that endures is the one planted in the page.

"Do you still go back, even now, and re-read poems you have written?" "Yes. I read to remember my childhood. And there is great joy..." He does not finish, but the sentence completes itself.

.......On my way home from school
............up tribal Providence Hill
.................past the Academy ballpark
.......where I could never hope to play
............I scuffed in the drainage ditch
.................among the sodden seethe of leaves
.......hunting for perfect stones
............rolled out of glacial time
.................into my pitcher's hand;

"The Testing-Tree," like many of his lyrics, begins as a track backward into the woods of his early youth, for there his own mythology was born, where "I played my game for keeps— / for love, for poetry, / and for eternal life—" and each stone he whips at his oak tree target becomes one of Hansel's, marking a way toward his imagination's home. He writes in "The Layers,"

Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.

He has made himself a cairn out of this common treasure ("a tribe of my affections," he calls it), out of snatches of street music, lamplighting, raccoons scratching on his porch, the first moon landing, biology of the human brain, but above all, his kinship with the natural world. Like a magpie in a jewelry shop, he overlooks very little, for the material of his poems is ultimately the material of existence. When an interviewer once asked a question about his "career," Kunitz answered it, then said: "Incidentally, I can't think of it as a career. To me it's a life."

When the wires of one's sensation are so easily tripped; when the memory skips with such agility from one time and place to another, ramifying each experience in a dozen directions; and when the two are wedded for over a century, the layers of which he writes begin to pile up. He once planted ten thousand trees in Bucks County , Pennsylvania , stopping only to serve in the Second World War. One poem, "River Road," recalls returning to the place, only to find "No Trespassing" signs posted all along the road. Ignoring them, he hops the stone wall and makes his way back into "the woods I made" where the poem leaves us, among "the deep litter of the years." How does a man keep his head so long? How does a man keep making poems so long? He seems to write from beneath the shade of his own age, as though the seedlings sown in his childhood have woven a roof over his head. Even more remarkable, he has never stopped planting, watering, pruning, tending. He has made out of the time in which he is living a woods that is likely to survive him. Reading Kunitz, one gets the sense that there is not one testing-tree, but many, that our paths are lined with them, some as solid as ever, some split. He was already sixty-three when he heard over the radio that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, out of which came these lines:

.......In a murderous time
...........the heart breaks and breaks
...............and lives by breaking.
.......It is necessary to go
...........through dark and deeper dark
...............and not to turn.
.......I am looking for the trail.
...........Where is my testing-tree?
...............Give me back my stones!

Standing up to leave, we ask if he plans to be in Provincetown this summer. "Depends," he says, as though it were out of his control. His assistant Genine will not let him off the hook. "Depends on what, Stanley?" One can nearly see him reaching back into his pocket for a smooth, round stone that fits his weathered palm. "I would like to have another garden."

"Try! Try!" clicks the beetle in his wrist,
his heart is an educated swamp,
and he is mindful of his garden,
which prepares to die.

 

Henry Walters has spent much of his youth grubbing in the dirt to no avail.