TRUST IN MAXINE KUMIN 291But that ’s just the point: “you can console yourself with the thought that come
May, come June, you’re going to have new life in the barn.” The two sides prime
each other, poetry and farming, “my writing depends on the well-being” from
“chores undertaken and completed.”
Nature of several kinds, animal and plant and weather, glistens and runs
freely through “Credo,” in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 1991. Reach-
ing out to a budding year, “I believe in the resurrected wake-robin,” says Kumin,
naming not a bird but a flower, the “first wet knob of trillium.” Raised Jewish,
Calvinist in her work ethic or “Hebrew Puritan,” and an atheist believer in natu-
ral process, she cites “the black crumbles / of ancient manure that sift through
my fingers” in her credo, “wet strings of earthworms,” the bear “still denned
up”—“I cede him a swale of chokecherries in August.”
Ever since she and her husband settled in 1976 on a two-hundred-acre New
Hampshire farm, Kumin believes in “the gift of the horse,” and gives horses
her keenest language.
their deep fear-snorts in play when the wind comes up,
the ballet of nip and jostle, plunge and crow hop,
I trust them to run from me, necks arched in a full
swan’s S, tails cocked up over their backs
like plumes on a Cavalier’s hat. I trust them
to gallop back, skid to a stop, their nostrils
level with my mouth, asking for my human breath
that they may test its intent, taste the smell of it.
I believe in myself as their sanctuary
and the earth with its summer plumes of carrots,
its clamber of peas, beans, masses of tendrils
as mine.A fine balance, this belief in herself within the world at large. The horses run
off yet come back trusting, she trusts earth’s clambering fruits “as mine.” So she
may, after decades of work carving out pasture, bringing in produce, splitting
cordwood, breeding, training, caring for horses because “We ’ve taken them
out of their wild state.”
We ’re a long way from Jeffers and his soaring hawks, Lawrence ’s mythic
snake, Bishop’s armadillo, Hughes’s crow and pike, Oppen’s deer who “startle,
and stare out” at human presence. In Kumin’s hands, a harmony of species oc-
curs as the horses “skid to a stop, their nostrils / / level with my mouth, asking
for my human breath.” Her encounter seems to flout God ’s chiding of Job:
“Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thun-
der? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? The glory of his nostrils is