Those who are asleep in the earth
have an avian sense of the way.
Gone, they sleep with shoes on,
ready to rise and go
to the pink, dispensable,
barefooted insomniacs
who had laced up for them
the last pair of shoes.

And accustomed ungentle hands of two blue-uniformed attendants
wrap the patient in suffering’s white bed gown
sewn with bright invisible emblems of virtues,
or pinned with them, as with fraternity pins, or mosaic pins,
meaning travel. Has he always only just arrived?
Really suffering, within and without his head
burn hot wires of pain: “I cannot bear this”: and does,
and does the time and place outwardly expound
what is within? To be well, to wear new clothes,
to decimate his wage for a necktie, a scarf or gloves, love

They brought it. It was brought
from the field, the last sheaf, the last bundle

the latest and most final armful. Up up
over the head, hold it, hold it high it held

the gazer’s gaze, it held hope, did hold it.
Through the stubble of September, on shoulders

aloft, hardly anything, it weighed, like a sparrow,
it was said, something winged, hollow, though

pulsing, freed from the field
where it flailed in wind, where it waited, wanted

to be found and bound with cord. It had
limbs, it had legs. And hands. It had fingers.

It’s often those
who talk a streak

on world affairs
and love and peace

who seem to love
and peace the least.

In case you sit across from the meteorologist tonight,
and in case the dim light over the booth in the bar still shines
almost planetary on your large, smooth, winter-softened
forehead, in case all of the day—its woods and play, its fire—
has stayed on your beard, and will stay through the slight
drift of mouth, the slackening of even your heart’s muscle—
… well. I am filled with snow. There’s nothing to do now
but wait.

Even gods, though they were born
in our own heads, died out to myth.

Just as no one can point to the source
of the spring or later at sea can say: this

is the water from deep in the earth, that
flowed from the mountaintops, so

is the stream of mortals and gods.

About my origins I know
nothing. I married the earth, a child

grew in me, fell
out of me at last, and I

babbled: little mutt of mine, I'll
name you, dunk you in invulnerability.

He smiled at me, held me tightly
by the heel and said mama.

I hear the cawing of some drifting crows,
Beneath in villages the watch-dog blows
His bayings to the scene, and King-birds shriek,
And stronger breezes fan the happy cheek,
While purest roseate turns the western sky,
Laughing to think that night has drawn so nigh.
And like a ball of melted iron glows
The sinking sun, leaves his last veil, and throws
Upon the Eastern hills a gentle red,
Upon those skies his rosy pencil spread,
Then dies within that stormy mountain cloud,
That masks him proudly in a leaden shroud.

Who can be sad and live upon this earth,
A scene like this would make a Hermit mirth,
And turn mankind to Painters, or forswear
All sympathies save with this landscape-air,
While comes the breeze as gently as caress
Of pensive lovers in first blessedness.
A yellow tone sweeps southward the horizon,
The sun to weaving deeper shadows plies on,
More mountains loom, and hills burst up like isles
Shot in the sea by Earth's galvanic piles;
One clear black spot hangs o'er the valley there,
A solitary Hawk balanced on air;

Now the veiled sun is drooping to his fall,
Weaving the western landscape a thick pall
From the gigantic Air-smoke, through it slant
His stretching beams, the mighty figures daunt
The eye, far-shading level smoke that side,
While eastward the white towns in sunshine ride.
But all around this wonderful, wild haze,
Like a hot crucible wherein the days
And nights are melted by a giant hand,
A terrible world, neither sea nor land,
As if at last old earth had caught on fire,
And slowly mouldering, sank into the pyre.

It is a busy mountain,—the wind's song
Levels so briskly the oak-tops along,
Which light October frosts color like wine,
That ripens red on warm Madeira's line.
I hear the rustling plumes of these young woods,
Like young cockerels crowing to the solitudes
While o'er the far horizon trails a mist,
A kind of autumn smoke or blaze,—I list,
Again, a lively song the woods do sing,
The smoke-fire drifts about painting a ring
Sublime, the centre of which is the mountain;
It rises like the cloud of some dark fountain