So Far So Good

Final Poems: 2014-2018

URSULA K. LE GUIN

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So Far So Good

Observations

Little Grandmother

A dry-voiced chickadee

reproves what’s gone amiss.

From our crab-apple tree

she gazes critically

at autumn’s entropy

and quietly says this:

I am Chickadee,

and things have gone amiss.

Words for the Dead

Mouse my cat killed

grey scrap in a dustpan

carried to the trash

To your soul I say:

With none to hide from

run now, dance

within the walls

of the great house

And to your body:

Inside the body

of the great earth

in unbounded being

be still

McCoy Creek: Cattle

Long after sunset the afterlight

glows warm along the rimrock.

A wind down off the mountain

blows soft, a little chill.

I’ve come to love the quiet sound

cattle make cropping short grass.

Day and night are much the same

to them in the pastures of summer,

cows and calves, they crop and pull

with that steady, comfortable sound

as the light in the rimrock and the sky

dims away slowly. Now no wind.

I don’t know if cattle see the stars,

but all night long they graze

and walk and stand in the calm

light that has no shadows.

Merlin

I

Her feathery raiment and the July sun

made her a glory as she flew,

a blaze of gold and white

dappled with dun against the blue.

Instant as a meteor she claimed the sky,

jinked, veered, towered to soar

above the hill, and disappeared,

crying her piercing, hissing cry.

II

Mice in the dry roots of the grasses

on the sunlit hill

crouched when that shadow passed.

Small birds down by the creek

were still,

hearing the dragon speak.

All Saints All Souls

This is the day when the saints all go

silently to church in France

and over the mountains of Mexico

the bare bones dance.

Ghosts rise up from graveyard sleep

to follow the southward-fleeing sun.

It is the doomsday of the leaf,

the feast day of the skeleton.

McCoy Creek: Wind

The wind beats on the drums

of my ears and overturns the chairs,

blowing out of all the years

we’ve come here, been here.

The bird that says tzeep says tzeep.

Dry pods on the old honey locust rattle.

Barbed wire draws straggling lines between

us and distant cattle.

Rocking like little white sailboats

two hens cross the footbridge.

Behind me and before me

the basalt ridges are silent

as the air is silent when

the wind for a moment ceases.

Six Quatrains

AUTUMN

gold of amber

red of ember

brown of umber

all September

MCCOY CREEK

Over the bright shallows

now no flights of swallows.

Leaves of the sheltering willow

dangle thin and yellow.

OCTOBER

At four in the morning the west wind

moved in the leaves of the beech tree

with a long rush and patter of water,

first wave of the dark tide coming in.

SOLSTICE

On the longest night of all the year

in the forests up the hill,

the little owl spoke soft and clear

to bid the night be longer still.

THE WINDS OF MAY

are soft and restless

in their leafy garments

that rustle and sway

making every moment movement.

HAIL

The dogwood cowered under the thunder

and the lilacs burned like light itself

against the storm-black sky until the hail

whitened the grass with petals.

Incantations

Come to Dust

Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body

that are to come, the motions

of the matter that held you.

Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.

Fall to the earth in the falling rain.

Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.

Mount slowly in the rising sap

to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.

Come down to earth as leaves in autumn

to lie in the patient rot of winter.

Rise again in spring’s green fountains.

Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen

to fall in blessing.

All earth’s dust

has been life, held soul, is holy.

On Second Hill

Where on this wild hill alone

a child watched the evening star,

let these bits of ash and bone

rejoin the earth they always were,

the earth that let her sing her love,

the gift that made the giver

here on the lonely hill above

the valley of the river.

Lullaby

where’s my little fleeting cat

a year a year an hour a day

where’s my little girl at

fleeting away sleeping away

found the way clear away

nowhere far nowhere near

a day a day an hour a year

To the Rain

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,

falling on fallow, on field and forest,

on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,

downwelling waters all-washing, wider

than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster

than countrysides, calming, recalling:

return to us, teaching our troubled

souls in your ceaseless descent

to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,

to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.

Travelers

I

We came from the far side of the river

of starlight and will cross back over

in a little boat

no bigger than two cupped hands.

II

Thinking about compassion.

A firefly in a great dark garden.

An earthworm naked

on a concrete path.

III

I think of the journey

we will take together

in the oarless boat

across the shoreless river.

Meditations

There was a jar in Oregon

not this time in Tennessee,

on which I set a crimson pear

without a reason but to see

the charm of chance propinquity.

The Fine Arts

Judging beauty, which is keenest,

Eye or heart or mind or penis?

Lust is blindest, feeling kindest,

Sight is strongest, thought goes wrongest.

An Autumn Reading

for Andrea

The poet read in the Scholar’s Room

in the Chinese garden, her words

half heard in rush and crash of rain

on formal ponds and pavements,

like verses cut in an old stone

blurred by moss and lichen.

Under the downpour purple

chrysanthemums nodded in silence.

“There is always something watching you”

Eight bright bits of jet in the head

of a tiny spider hidden in cracked veneer.

Eye of a goldfish from its clear element

to which ours is all depths and vanishings.

The triple mirror in the half-lit hall

dwindling by repetition into its own dark.

A telescope across the city or on Aldebaran.

Your jealous god. Your neighbor’s sad desire.

The sun itself, whose eye you only meet

briefly, as it begins to turn away.

The old ghost in your room

you’ve never seen, although it visits

timidly, sometimes.

The forest where you’ve lost your way,

though it knows where you are going.

Outsight

I’m half unseen,

to me, my skin

a screen

to all within.

My eyes can see a star,

but not my mind.

The more I think, the more

I am unfamiliar.

Insight is half blind

and surface-bounded.

Where is my core?

What inwardnesses are

unseen, unsounded?

Lesser Senses

Thinking of beauty

as sight we keep forgetting

the warmth of the fire

in the brightness of firelight,

in graceful ripples the grace

of water to thirst.

Soft as air, the touch of fur

on the touching hand

is as beautiful surely

as the curve of the cat’s leap.

No keener beauty

than a dry branch of sagebrush,

the harsh, poignant scent

bringing the silent desert

distances back to the heart.

A Cento of Scientists

Alternating lines from Charles Darwin,
Galileo Galilei, and Giordano Bruno

There is grandeur

The sun with all the circling planets it sustains

God is glorified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest

in this view of life

the sun with all the circling planets yet

glorified not in one but in countless suns

from so simple a beginning endless forms

the sun with all the planets it sustains yet can ripen a bunch
of grapes

not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand

endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

the sun can ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in
the universe to do

not in a single world but in a thousand thousand, an infinity
of worlds

endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been
and are being evolved

as if it had nothing else in the universe to do

All things are in the universe, and the universe is in all things,
we in it and it in us

There is grandeur in this view of life

How it Seems to Me

In the vast abyss before time, self

is not, and soul commingles

with mist, and rock, and light. In time,

soul brings the misty self to be.

Then slow time hardens self to stone

while ever lightening the soul,

till soul can loose its hold of self

and both are free and can return

to vastness and dissolve in light,

the long light after time.

Elegies

It Used to Be

It used to be the shine of streetlights

on a rain-wet street was winter

and summer was outdoors and most of the time.

A season’s slant of light noticed only

in August on the golden knolls, the hint

of ending, to love that well… The moon

was full and half and full and gone again

just as it pleased. Mostly the wind blew sweet

in off the Bay, but not the rare,

dry, bare north wind, the earthquake wind.

Sea fog, dear fog, came drifting in the Golden Gate

sometime in the afternoon and in the year

and was everywhere a while, the garden dripped

in a grey hush, then it was all gone.

I am wise to the seasons now. I foretell an altered light,

observe the Solstice and the Equinox,

am eased by the majestic order. I am old.

Yet still when fog from the river rises

silent and unforeseen, and the bright morning is all gone

into the uncreated, I rejoice.

Berkeley, December 1941

Imagine! blackout curtains in that house

with all its tall bright windows south and west!

They were of some opaque-brown stuff that fit

close to the frame. We must have drawn them down

each evening, raised them up again each day.

I don’t remember doing that. I do recall

the first night, being scared and unprepared.

Only my parents’ bedroom had any curtains,

and hardly thick enough to hide a light

from enemies in air above the sea,

so in the dark house, the dark city, we

all seven sat there round the Franklin stove

in the warm cave a single candle built

from shadows with its flame. And Alfred read

the bible to us. We were as irreligious

as coyotes, and I don’t know what he read,

but it was great, and grave, and suitable

to that strange night, the first night of a war.

And I remember when we took the blackout

curtains down, years later, how we stood

a long time looking at the patterned lights

of our bright cities, and the first calm stars.

Theodora

I think how fine my mother was.

Her doings and her things were lovable.

Her turquoise bracelets, her violet

dinner dress with a jeweled waist.

The way when she was undressing

she’d go around with her nylons unhitched.

I think of all this now with tenderness

and comfort in the recollection.

Oh I was so angry at her when she died

for dying, but at last that’s gone

and she comes to me again with silver

and turquoise on her wrists

in the sunlight.

Felled

Sterile gravel, stepping stones

where the great willow grew.

Only to me in empty air

a tree I must walk through.

Rift

Looking at you over on that other side

of the rift that you decreed

between us, I’m scared to see

how hard, how fast the run of years

scours such a channel. Miles

across now. I can’t tell how deep.

Talking, laughing, in the shade of the cedars

Bright and broad at the wide bend,

that was a kinder river, where grace was.

Still the shadowy-sunny water

from a spring the color of peacocks

is flowing on down through the forest

a long way from this desert canyon.

Talking, laughing, in the shade of the cedars

For Heggaia

When you lived in the Valley of the Na

and were a goldsmith

you made a little disc of gold, the sun

on one side, the double spiral

on the other, for Intrumo of Sinshan.

After you left, she wore it

on a golden chain, the rayed sun shining outward

the hinge of the spiral hidden against her throat.

Pretty soon she’ll follow you

through that open doorway,

and coming by your workshop

near the bank of the River Na

smile to see you working.

“So you are here,” you’ll say,

and she, “Go along easily,

Heggaia of my heart!

I left your sun there in the other Valley

for us to find some day.”

Bats

I

When I used to see bats flying

in the California twilight

their intricate zigzag voices

went flickering with them

but they fell silent with the years

and without that tiny sonar static

to see them flicker

in and out of being

is a kind of blindness

II

In the twilight in my dream

a little bat was flying

and awakening I wondered

if the bat that I remembered

flying in the twilight

of the dream of California

was in California or the dream.

After the Death of Orpheus

The rocks his song had moved, the wild

creatures that had gathered to him,

grieved as the echo of his song

followed the river into silence.

His shade stood awhile bewildered

at the shadowy door. At last

he went in and saw the downward way.

He had gone that way before

yet it could not be familiar.

Did he know the slight figure waiting

beside the pathway for him?

She turned and went ahead,

unspeaking. He followed her.

She did not turn around.

She led him down the vast descent

of twilight to the shore

where the old boatman waited,

received his payment,

and rowed them slowly over.

There was nothing to be said.

Under the weightless boat

the waters of shadow ran silent

towards the beginning of all music.

July

Sun warms the lizard’s back

and the humble back of the mountain.

A raven croaks from the top of a thermal.

The valley oak above the barn,

dying a huge branch at a time,

stands in calm mortality, content

with the warm light that has fed its leaves,

the dark waters that have fed its roots,

its acorns that have fed the woodpeckers

for five hundred rainy seasons.

Looking Back

Remember me before I was a heap of salt,

the laughing child who seldom did

as she was told or came when she was called,

the merry girl who became Lot’s bride,

the happy woman who loved her wicked city.

Do not remember me with pity.

I saw you plodding on ahead

into the desert of your pitiless faith.

Those springs are dry, that earth is dead.

I looked back, not forward, into death.

Forgiving rains dissolve me, and I come

still disobedient, still happy, home.

The Night Journey

Wakeful

Islanded

Snow and silence in the streets.

Winter in the bone.

In silent houses people sleep

each one alone.

Self-islanded by thought and dream

the solitary soul

forgets the deepest depth, the earth

that joins us all.

Night Voices

I

The great metal cattle of the train yards

bawl and bawl across the city in the darkness

cows calling their lost calves

from farther and farther

II

All night the black rain

on the cold pane

whispers, whispers,

we are your sisters

Noctis oceanus

The small, dark hours pass by, unlighted ships

far out on a starlit sea,

shadows through dim radiance. No origin,

no destination. Slip by and are gone.

If my mind could go on with them

into the compassless unending night,

boat with no harbor, hunter with no prey.

What I sought in voyaging I found,

the gifts I asked were given. Now

discoveries turn mystery, gift is loss.

Out beyond the gains and ends,

is only the voyage in starlight.

If I could know this fearlessly,

give up and give away, be easy and rejoice

that the little I knew was everything.

But darkness ebbs, its unity

yields to the dividing sun, unrisen yet already

sketching the architectures of the light

faint and inexorable on the shores of day.

Falling

Company

A paw, a questing nose half waken me,

and I let him get under the covers.

He curls up and purrs himself asleep.

Cats are less troublesome than lovers.

Doze

The little stone my mind

slips into the cloudy pond

and slowly settles in the silt

at the bottom of the water it could be forever

Farther

Adrift adrift

on the sound of rain

on a windless sea

in a sailless skiff

Sleep

The way it comes unnoticed, so easily.

Like when we were on the tide flats

of the great bay, a long time ago now,

the two girls wandering out between me

and the far-off, glittering water,

each of us crouching at a rock pool

absorbed, and then another rock pool,

till I looked up and saw the shine of water

between black rocks and weed wrack

where there had been only sand,

saw how it covered up the rocks

so easily, a rising as soft as sinking.

And the little one too far away to hear.

Her sister and I ran towards her,

calling, hollering, finally she looked up,

stood up, and struggled back to us

through quick-flowing, deepening water.

We splashed through shallows to the sand,

stood, turned, watched the glittering tide

rocking where we had been out there,

the other element:

where, to be, we must be other.

There all we know we must know differently,

in vastnesses, abysses, in shifting images,

in silences, illusions, monsters, gleams,

and always, under all, the dark,

and the peaceful sinking deeper as it rises.

Dreaming

Tracks

Strange are the ways and tracks of dreams

mind follows in its nightly wanderings.

The Syrian girls, their dark and timid eyes.

We gave the eggs to them. I finally found

the furry nest the cat had made

in the bank of dirt below the tennis court.

How glad I was to see him there and safe

from the strangers who’d taken over the house

and the coyotes everywhere. The eggs were all

painted with red dots and curlicues.

Connections vanish as I wake, but still

the little pawprints on the hidden track

into the nest are comforting to me.

The People

Some people have begun to come into my dreams

from a long way away,

traveling over the mountain passes

that nobody living knows.

Old people who smell like fog

and the soft bark of redwoods.

They talk together softly.

They know more than I know.

I think they come from home.

Waking

Seaward

foam on the low waves

morning dreams go drifting out

with the tide of light

vanishing as bubbles do

beings of air and water

seafoam my memory

is also evanescent

spindrift from wave crests

white manes of the white horses

blown by the land-wind seaward

dreams memories all

becoming immaterial

the self unselving

gone adrift on the same tide

So Far

So Far

The metaphor (not the subject) of these
twelve poems is Lt. William Bligh’s
navigation of an overloaded open boat
four thousand miles from Tonga past the
Australian coast to Timor in Maritime
Southeast Asia.

I. Planning

I set out on the everyday

with a watchful heart,

sunset

my only harbor.

I’ve lost my ship,

the command I led

and all her cargo.

I have this instead.

We’ve enough water

if we take care

and enough bread

to share.

Reefs to larboard

forbid the coast.

I steer the wind’s way

always west.

What is ahead

is wave after wave

night after day

far, and farther.

I hope to chart

this unknown shore

and the long way yet

to Timor.

II. The Boat

Well built but heavy laden

with the weight of our mortality

she clambers struggling up a swell,

a moment hangs aloft

in sight of all the bright horizon,

slips down to the unstable valley

to labor up and up again.

Five inches of freeboard,

the breadth of my hand.

III. The Food

Rage was my privilege.

I didn’t count its cost.

I’ve lost my anger

with the rest I lost.

Now my privilege

as I weigh out rations

of shred and crust

is a hungry patience.

Anger lays waste,

hunger saves and is fed.

I wait, and crave,

and am blest to have

my crust, my shred.

IV. The Unknown Continent

We are passing the great dry land

far south within the reefs.

Of its people we know only

we don’t understand each other

and ignorance is danger.

We dare not come ashore

save on the outmost islands

briefly, to seek water.

I am used to being lonely

but forever to be a stranger

is a strange grief.

V. The Absolution

Times between responsibilities

when I am not at the tiller

or bailing, but can be still a while,

the vastness slowly enters deep

intaken with my breath.

A quiet attention to all things.

Unselved. Absolved.

I wish it could continue so.

But we are overloaded

and always in danger

and I so need to sleep when I can sleep.

VI. Calm Sea

The boat is poised

on a column of water

miles high

from seafloor to daylight.

She rests, supported.

If she were whelmed

the great column

would still bear her,

lowering her slowly

to rest in silence.

VII. The Course Kept

We go as we go

because the wind blows so

in this region of the seas

in this season of the year.

We lack the means

to turn our sail, to back and fill,

to catch or spill the breeze

choosing the way we will,

taking the tack we please,

as once we did, or thought we did.

We go as we are sent

and do as we are bid,

obedient.

VIII. Timor

The little Latin that I know

tells me timor means fear.

Timor is where I go.

There’s no more land, no rest

between me and the west.

And day and night I steer

straight there, for what I fear

is not that landfall:

to lose my way

as I lost my command,

lose strength of hand

so I cannot steer,

the compass of the mind

till no way is left

and blindly day

and night nowhere

to no end drift.

IX. Intimations

My bare foot-soles

on the bare planking

are aware

of abyss and chasm.

Sometimes I feel

a tremor, a groping

upward beneath me

as if great beings

of the great deeps

were mutely seeking

me as I seek them.

X. The Boat Itself

The boat itself

the boat myself

alone

my crew my life

that I have never known

XI. Night

Between the blazing firmament

and the black abyss we are

in the mercy of the wind

that moves us on

through darkness over images of stars

between elements not ours.

Earth made our body,

rock made our bone.

Ocean is no man’s country.

Heaven is not my home.

O may we come at last to land

in the mercy of the wind.

XII. Westering

From sunrise the wind blows

always to sunset

going where the stars go

my breath the wind

this little boat my body

its ragged sail my soul

going where the stars go

In the Ninth Decade

Three Quatrains

OVER EIGHTY

The wire

gets higher

and they forget

the net

MATTER

In dream I’m quick on my feet as I used to be,

running up and down stairs with a light clatter,

walking free not even knowing that I’m free,

not yet mastered by my own dark matter.

THE HARE

The hare that dwells on the hill of delight

even in wintry age will not turn white.

Thinner, but as lively as before,

she springs and dances at Aphrodite’s door.

Theory of Aging

As the number of the year gets bigger

the year itself grows smaller

but heavier. It acquires gravity.

It will finally get so heavy

that it cannot continue as it is

but implodes to a black hole

into which sink all the years

becoming numberless

and utterly weightless.

The Old Novelist’s Lament

I miss the many that I was,

my lovers, my adventurers,

the women I went with to the Pole.

What was mine and what was theirs?

We were all rich. Now that I share

the cowardice of poverty,

I miss that courage of companionship.

I wish they might come back to me

and free me from this cell of self,

this stale sink of age and ills,

and take me on the ways they knew,

under the sky, across the hills.

All Abroad

No need of Como now, or unseen

long-dreamed-of Sicily,

or to behold once more

except in dream the Hebrides,

when every morning opens on a shore

more foreign than any morning used to seem.

The world may be as it used to be

but I am altered, I the eye that sees

all half known, half strange as if newborn

and fresh to its mortality.

Leaves

Years do odd things to identity.

What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of a leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

as the wind moves through the leaves.

The Last Visit

In the heart of my memory, that house,

memories overcame me.

Only if I could forget them

would I be there, in that house.

There where all I remembered

was substance visible,

I was my shadow’s shadow,

a child, a visitor, a ghost.

Where the ways grew narrow

Where the ways grew narrow

there above the sea,

tall flowers of yarrow

brushed against my knee.

All I have kept

from a time of sorrow:

a cold twilight

and the white yarrow.

The Desert Crossing

A wrinkled, spotted, pallid hide

stretched and sagging on a shack of bones

was her house now, her shaky tent

set up each day a little farther on

into the plain of thorns and dunes.

An awkward load to carry, so the way

was always farther between the springs of water.

The great silence lay behind each dune

like a lion with a woman’s head. She sang

in a voice like wind in sand, a long

answer to the question that it did not ask.

Walking the Maze

The bright, broad earth dims to become

a labyrinth in which I walk

on feet that ache, grow numb,

and yet must feel the way I take.

Stumbling me on where I can’t see,

step by step they make the road

I’m not quite sure is there. Unsure, unshod,

and slow, afraid to fall, I go

where all is now opaque

to me. Does the way lead out or in?

At the center, or the door, will I be free?

No choices left to make. I follow on

the maze whose gate and goal are mystery.

Desire and Fear

A willingness to die is my desire,

not of the mind alone

but of the weary heart and weakened bone.

My fear is that the body, always wanting more,

will clutch at flames of fire

sooner than leave me free to go

on through the open door.

The Combat

On the farthest margin of old age

in thickets and quicksands of half-sleep

the fat grey serpent of despair

wrestles with the thin tiger of my rage.

The tiger’s teeth meet in the snake.

Break, writhing backbone, break!

“Soul clap hands and louder sing” said Yeats

but the song this old soul wants to sing is soft,

like a child playing alone in a sunlit loft

with a long story she wants to tell,

singing it softly all to herself,

long, long, soft, soft.

Ancestry

I am such a long way from my ancestors now

in my extreme old age that I feel more one of them

than their descendant. Time comes round

in a bodily way I do not understand. Age undoes itself

and plays the Ouroboros. I the only daughter

have always been one of the tiny grandmothers,

laughing at everything, uncomprehending,

incomprehensible.

On the Western Shore

Ebb tide is when to roam

the long beach alone

and find the jetsam

of the forgotten or unknown,

a slender breastbone,

a glass net-float lost

from a boat off Honshu

borne over ocean

a century unbroken.

The lowest, the neap tide,

that bares long reaches

that were deep underwater

where the slope grows steep,

is when to walk out so far

that looking back you see

no shore. Under bare feet

the sand is bare and rippled. Dark

of evening deepens into night

and the sea becomes sleep.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929–2018) was a celebrated and beloved author of twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve children’s books, six volumes of poetry, and four books of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her five Nebulas and five Hugos, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

Also by Ursula K. Le Guin

FICTION

Rocannon’s World

Planet of Exile

City of Illusion

A Wizard of Earthsea

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Tombs of Atuan

The Lathe of Heaven

The Farthest Shore

The Dispossessed

The Word for World is Forest

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

Malafrena

The Beginning Place

The Eye of the Heron

Always Coming Home

Searoad

Tehanu

The Telling

Four Ways to Forgiveness

Unlocking the Air

Tales from Earthsea

The Other Wind

Gifts

Voices

Powers

Lavinia

NONFICTION

Dancing at the Edge of the World

The Wave in the Mind

Steering the Craft

Words Are My Matter

No Time to Spare

POETRY

Wild Angels

Walking in Cornwall (chapbook)

Tillai and Tylissos (chapbook with Theodora Kroeber)

Hard Words

In the Red Zone (chapbook with Henk Pander)

Wild Oats and Fireweed

No Boats (chapbook)

Blue Moon over Thurman Street (with Roger Dorband)

Going out with Peacocks

Sixty Odd

Incredible Good Fortune

Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems

Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014

TRANSLATION

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ursula sent off her revised manuscript for So Far So Good for copyediting on January 15, 2018. She died January 22. This book, then, is the last collection of her poetry she would edit; it is her farewell.

In creating these poems, Ursula worked in the illimitable space of her own imagination, yet always grounded and surrounded by her family and friends: by Charles most of all; by her children and grandchildren — Elisabeth, Lyra, Theo, Nancy, India, Isabel, Chip, Caroline, Rick; by Vonda, Katherine, Katie, Moe and George (and his oatcakes); by the Poetry group — Barbara, Bette, Jeannette, Kari, Molly, Noel — through which many of these poems passed in the process of coming to completion. And, of course, by Pard.

Bringing this book through to its final form has been the work of many hearts and hands, including Ginger Clark and Michael Wiegers and John Pierce at Copper Canyon Press.

And it seems fitting to acknowledge Ursula’s gratitude for the gift of words, a gift she never took for granted over a long lifetime — these words of hers, never wholly hers, that now she gives to you.

Caroline Le Guin

March 2018

Copyright 2018 by the Ursula K. Le Guin Estate

All rights reserved

Cover art: Lisa Gilley, Yakima Canyon (Yakima River, WA), 2013, oil on wood, 60” × 60”. http://www.lisagilley.com

ISBN: 978-1-55659-538-7

eISBN: 978-1-61932-189-2

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The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: “word” and “temple.” It also serves as pressmark for Copper Canyon Press.

Poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, Copper Canyon Press has published extraordinary poetry from around the world to engage the imaginations and intellects of readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, teachers, students, and donors.

The book you are holding is a testament to the diverse community of passionate readers who supported “Ursula K. Le Guin: A Poet’s Legacy.” Copper Canyon Press is deeply grateful to the following individuals around the world whose philanthropic vision and love of poetry made this legacy collection possible. We have published So Far So Good together. Thank you!

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