Classic Poem

Sometimes in an absolute sense
it seems they are passed—Past—these
houses presiding over a half-mile
of brown horse-road and a rail fence,
that pivot grandly behind their striding trees,
recede and are lost while
we wheel by them at seventy, seventy-five
miles an hour, sitting perfectly still,
the body not in it at all, only the will.

It's as if we could watch them slip
into their own preterite—house and yard
bumped by some co-efficient of
cosmic expansion: Time speeded up. . . .
I remember a certain blue, white-starred
trainer taxi-ing the rough
edge of a field in a racketing, dew-bright
cow-astounded Spring—a ship so blurred
now in the world's rocketry tomorrow-ward

the mere thought of it folds its wings
away among the lances of Arthur's knights
and its fluttering fuselage stalls beside
their high horses of parchment. Groundling
till then, I solo'd, staggering to the heights
of trees, and saw them slide
backward and down, saw towns of Tennessee
dwindle to dominoes, my shouts
drowned in the noise, the engine's iron salutes

to the glory of it, the wonder. . . . Who then
could imagine settling in, going slow,
building fence, letting sleeping dogs lie?
This sidelong look, aft and down
off the Taconic at a turning windrow,
brings it back now, and is also why
I think I would re-define Time-Past as something
those in it can't leave behind fast enough—
then find it was who they are, or what they love.











By permission of the author.