Classic Poem

By the well in the desert I sat for long,
And watched the magpies, with black-and-white checkered bodies,
Leaping from twig to twig of the greasewood,
To look at the water spilled on the ground
By the herder who went by with three lean cattle,
Climbing out of the blue-and-gold silence of morning.
There was the shadow well with stones piled about it,
The coarse tattered rope, the battered tin bucket
And the nose of my pony cropping thin grass not far off,
The grey sagebrush and silence.
At the horizon
The heat rose and fell,
Sharp flickering arpeggios;
The wind started somewhere,
Then stopped.
The blue smoke of my cigarette,
Wavered and failed.
I was drowsing,
And it seemed to me in my dream
That I was riding
To a low brown cluster of squat adobe houses
Under the eaves of a red barren mesa,
Where the track of a wagon trail paused, dipped, and vanished
By a corral of rough plastered stone:
And I saw in my dream,
Looking down at the houses,
An Indian with a red sash, flannel shirt and blue trousers,
And a red band about his coarse black hair.
Eyes dark as an antelope's
Looked up at me:
Sheep were feeding about him.
And I said to him, " Where do you come from? "
And he replied,
" From Nazareth, beyond the desert,