Late  one spring morning in 1986, I was creeping along the edge of Ox Road, Virginia route 123, driving with one hand, and shoving mail into the boxes on posts with the other.  I was a substitute rural mail carrier,  working a route just south of the seemingly nonexistent town of Fairfax Station.

Beyond the mailboxes, prefab McMansions were going up on every side, as fast as the builders could hammer them together.

It was the second year of Ronald Reagan’s second term, and the woods along Ox Road were swarming with smalltime winners in the stampede for the billions  that the Gipper and his cronies were shoveling into a grand military buildup. The new settlers were devouring the woods along Ox Road like nuclear powered termites. Their contract profits were  pouring with the concrete under the rows of McMansions, markers of their status as suburban arrivistes.

Reagan’s frantic rearmament was meant to drive the Evil Empire of Communist Russia into bankruptcy and oblivion trying to match it.

The bankruptcy drive was ultimately successful, but the big plan soon capsized like the Titanic after the iceberg, sunk by the unexpected vigor of the aftermath:  who could have suspected that the Commies’ dark oblivion would turn out to be a den full of new monsters?

Actually, lots of people did; even I, going in circles on that obscure mail route —  a fan of neither Gipper nor the Evils, I too suspected it.

But that’s another story.  It was spring, the snow had melted, and on my radio, the host was talking, not of World War Three, but about poetry.

The 1986 Pulitzer Prizes had just been announced, and the poetry award went to one Henry Taylor, an English professor at American University in Washington (D.C.).

I don’t follow poetry much, and had never heard of Taylor. But something about him—the way he talked about himself and even the poetry he read, was somehow familiar. Much later I could give it a name: the man had a Quaker accent.

As I listened, reflexively flipping shut one mailbox door after another, I grew more sure of it. His wasn’t a regional lilt, or dropped “g”s, but still subtly distinctive, somehow recognizable.

By then I had been among Quakers, mainly the liberal brand, for nigh twenty years, on both coasts, with stops in between. Had I finally learned something about us?

My hunch was soon confirmed, by Taylor’s answer to a caller’s question as to whether his Quaker upbringing had influenced his poetry. He wasn’t sure about that, he said, but he was indeed a Friend.

In fact, he was not just a member, but then Clerk of Goose Creek Meeting in Lincoln Virginia, where three of his Taylor forebears, two of them  likewise named Henry, had also served as Clerk.

Lincoln is a historic village in Loudoun County, about 50 miles northwest of Washington D.C. First called Goose Creek in the 1740s by its Quaker settlers, their descendants opposed slavery and secession, and many tried to avoid the fighting in the Civil War. When Union forces came to burn out Confederate guerrillas in the area late in November 1864, Quaker farms and mills were burned as well, if only because their crops helped feed the increasingly hungry rebel troops.

Goose Creek became the first community in the Civil War South to be renamed for President Abraham Lincoln.

I soon met Henry Taylor, when he  spoke at Baltimore Yearly Meeting that  summer of 1986, and read several of his poems. We were almost the same age, both born in 1942. I interviewed him for my print version of A Friendly Letter.

A handful of his poems are included below,  along with excerpts from his talk and a later interview in the Roanoke Review. On being a “Quaker poet,” he said:

“I have avoided linking ‘poet’ and ‘Friend’ in any adjective-noun combination because, to me, terms like ‘Quaker poet’ suggest kinds of work that I rarely do.

As a writer, I suppose I have been more keenly aware of my Southern heritage than my Quaker heritage, though the tensions inherent in being a Southern Quaker have been rewarding, since the values and attitudes of Quakerism have sometimes been at odds with the values and attitudes that shaped most of the rural South.

So I have what seems to me a usefully schizophrenic reaction to such things as tradition, ceremony, form and change…. What, then, can I say here about the many poems of mine which seem to have little to do with Friendly concerns? Only that my first adult encounter with what was then called  The Book of Discipline was a reassuring and confirming experience.”

He didn’t say more about what that first experience of Quaker discipline entailed. Yet while not prominent, the connection has occasionally surfaced, as in a pair of poems, written years apart, about “The Old Friends,” marking a young man’s leaving home, and an older one’s return:

GOODBYE TO THE OLD FRIENDS

Because of a promise I cannot break I have returned to my father’s house,
and here,
for the first time in years, I have risen early this Sunday to visit the Friends.

As I drive to the Meeting House, the trees wave softly as the wind moves over me.
I am late. Faces turn to look at me;
I sit in a bench apart, and silence breaks slightly, like the rustle of old trees.

I wonder whether I am welcome here, but in the old wall clock I see a friend.
An old man I remember now has risen
to say that this is Easter. Christ has risen.

The ticking of this old wall clock
distracts me
as this old man addresses his friends; he prowls for an hour through a Bible, breaks his voice to bring my wandering mind back here from aimless circling through the aging trees
whose branches tick like clocks. Boughs cut
from trees,
disposed through the room, remind me of the risen
Christ this voice speaks of; I do not see
him here.

I do not see him here, but flowers tell me, on the mantel before us, in scent that breaks above the graying heads of nodding Friends,
on hats and in lapels of aging Friends, the flowers and the branches from the trees remind me of what this old man’s voice breaks for the last time to tell us: Christ has
risen.
with the tongue of a man he speaks to me and to his Friends; there are no angels here.

At last I shout without breath my first prayer here
and ask for nothing but silence. Two old
Friends
turn slowly toward each other, letting me know how much silence remains.

The trees
ripple the silence, and the spirit has risen.
Two old hands of marble meet and Meeting
breaks.

Old Friends move over the lawn, among old
trees.
One offers me his hand. I have risen, I am thinking, as I break away from here.

RETURN TO THE OLD FRIENDS

This Meeting House, rising from a rejoicing April landscape,
is emptied of all music, though sunlight glances brightly from the
crimson
flowers by the road. We feel the hollow clash of mystery at this liveliness,
opposing the final smallness of our hopes that peace
may be with him forever, whose life was peace.

My grandfather is here, beyond all the rejoicing
he carried into his legendary garden, opposing the encroachment of things he had not planted,
music
rising from around him in those days as the
clash
of hoe on stone struck sparks of crimson

until the whole garden seemed stained crimson with his foes’ blood.
Yet by his labor, peace flourished in his garden, until, as at a clash of cymbals, we find him, far from all rejoicing;
we walk to our seats as to a solemn music.

Years have gone by since I left here, opposing all that this house gave me while opposing mysteries called me to other places, crimson pageantries these Friends distrust.
What music did I look for when I left this house of peace shaking certain hands for the last time,
rejoicing
in what I thought my victory in the old clash
with all that fathered me? I relive that
clash,
trying to recall the force I was opposing in my father’s calm eyes as I fled rejoicing.

Now it is Easter, spring is green and crimson,
yet his father lies here. I come in peace to greet old Friends once more, in search of
music
that deserted me at my departure, music free of pageantry or sound,
without the clash of bells that signal anything but peace.

My grandfather lies still as stone, opposing my wish for breath below the touch of crimson,
yet in his presence now I stand rejoicing.

This silent music in my blood, opposing the clash of sunlight dancing on crimson,
leads me toward peace and a strange rejoicing.

Taylor continued, “I have valued the humor that turns up even in the gravest of circumstances, and, by including it in essentially serious poems, I have tried to see the world more fully, more seriously, than pure solemnity usually can.

I have tried to avoid being fancy even when some subtlety was unavoidable; in a state of patiently active waiting, I have been a seeker for the phrasing, and the world view, that would seem truest and most nearly unrevisable.”

Here is an example:

RIDING LESSON

I learned two things from an early riding teacher.
He held a nervous filly in one hand and gestured with the other, saying, “Listen.
Keep one leg on one side, the other leg on the other side, and your mind in the middle.”

He turned and mounted.
She took two steps, then left the ground, I thought for good.
But she came down hard, humped her back,
swallowed her neck, and threw her rider as you’d throw a rock.

He rose, brushed
his pants and caught his breath, and said,
“See that’s the way to do it.
When you see they’re gonna throw you, get off.”

Taylor also, as one reviewer said, worked to

“describe similarly unexpected changes that occur in the course of otherwise predictable lives spent in relaxed, countryside settings. A New York Times reporter added, ‘Thus in the best poems here . . .  .we find something altogether different. Mr. Taylor seeks for his poetry [a] kind of unsettling change, [a] sort of rent in the veil of ordinary life.’”

As he did in the remarkable, “Landscape With Tractor”:

How would it be if you took yourself off to a house set well back from a dirt road,
with, say, three acres of grass bounded by road, driveway, and vegetable garden?

Spring and summer you would mow the field, not down to lawn, but with a bushhog,
every six weeks or so, just often enough to give grass a chance, and keep weeds down.

And one day — call it August, hot, a storm recently past, things green and growing a bit,
and you’re mowing, with half your mind on something you’d rather be doing, or did once.

Three rounds, and then on the straight alongside the road,
maybe three swaths in from where you are now, you glimpse it.

People will toss all kinds of crap from their cars.
It’s a clothing store dummy, for God’s sake.

Another two rounds, and you’ll have to stop, contend with it, at least pull it off to one side.
You keep going. Two rounds more, then down off the tractor, and Christ!
Not a dummy, a corpse.

The field tilts, whirls, then steadies as you run.

Telephone. Sirens. Two local doctors use pitchforks to turn the body, some four days dead, and ripening.

And the cause of death no mystery: two bullet holes in the breast of a well-dressed Black woman
in perhaps her mid-thirties. They wrap her, take her away. You take the rest of the day off.

Next day, you go back to the field, having to mow over the damp dent in the tall grass
where bluebottle flies are still swirling, but the bushhog disperses them, and all traces.

Weeks pass. You hear at the post office that no one comes forward to say who she was.

Brought out from the city, they guess, and dumped like a bag of beer cans.
She was someone, and now is no one, buried or burned or dissected; but gone. And I ask you again,
how would it be?

To go on with your life, putting gas in the tractor, keeping down thistles,
and seeing, each time you pass that spot, the form in the grass, the bright yellow skirt, black shoes,
the thing not quite like a face whose gaze blasted past you at nothing when the doctors heaved her over?

To wonder, from now on, what dope deal, betrayal, or innocent refusal, brought her here,
and to know she will stay in that field till you die?

From, “Master of None”:

An old story comes back,
from wartime, when steel was scarce,
and broken parts of farm machines had to be put back together;
on such an errand, once, my father stood around for half a day,
waiting his turn with a welder.

To kill time, he wondered aloud how hard welding was,
and the shop foreman said,
“That dumb son of a bitch out there learned to do it.”

So, out of necessity, he mastered it, and I watched him for years;
now greed gnaws at me whenever I watch some close work well done
and remember the shop foreman’s line,
or mysteries I absorbed
from my life among horses,
who taught me, in their way, most of what I know now.

Taylor was not overawed by the 1986 prize. He told a Washington Post reporter that  “The Pulitzer has a funny way of changing people’s opinions about it. If you haven’t won one, you go around saying things like ‘Well, it’s all political’ or ‘It’s a lottery’ and stuff like that. I would like to go on record as saying that although I’m deeply grateful and feel very honored, I still believe that it’s a lottery and that nobody deserves it.”

Perhaps this deprecation reflected the fact that in his career he also collected numerous other awards and fellowships. Yet despite this peer recognition, a  Poetry Foundation profile noted that he

As a valedictory, here is a poem looking back, showing an artist and a Quaker, working with high craft, penetrating vision, and with steadfast modesty: