followed it a little distance
until we reached a bridge over
a stream and there we stopped. We could see
the beginning of the woods and hills,
and a twist of smoke from a fire rose up
and trickled into the hot sky.
Again we were amazed and afraid,
though no one spoke it; but now I see
there must be fear, there must be strange
unsteady fear in faith. The hoboes
were over there. Their presence, like that
of God or lust or even grief,
had drawn us out in wonder, but then,
in shame, we’d trembled and turned away,
and that, I think, is also part
of faith, its imperfection.
NO. 9 WIRE
I go down close, eye-blank
to the first page of a thing, like the hank
of wire I hung over a nail
in the barn. I’ve twisted the origins
of the wire and it’s likely Mister Key,
careless and melancholy long
before my time, it’s likely he
is the one who left the wire, perhaps
not long enough to hitch a gate.
But people have their visions, don’t they?
Where everything inside has purpose
and nothing is cast out because
belonging to the vision is
the vision. I’ve seen a hive of bees
work mountain laurel trees, I’ve seen
them visit every blossom, and thought
to myself, so must it be in heaven.
The other man from the old days
I think about, Sylvanus Shade,
took a wild rose cane
and bent it to a shepherd’s crook,
and when he died they stuck the crook
in the ground and roses bloomed upon it,
tresses of roses tumbled down,
as he had claimed they would. He said
there was no end to anything,
not even death would be an end.
His daughter, Sylvie, made a teacher
of the schoolmarm type, and she
taught Mister Key, back when the roads
were traces and tracks along the streams.
I’ve seen the way he made a 4,
marked backwards on a barn beam.
And he must have learned the philosophy
that disarray is beautiful,
and even a piece of wire is rare,
though what a man could use it for
is more uncommon still, and endless.
So he unknowingly taught me,
just as careless with my numbers
and with melancholy of my own,
who loves rose canes and bees
and the sweet of mountain laurel trees,
and all the unseen underneath.
The people who had this place before
it came to me were the Graves, but the man
who built the barn was Mister Key —
I’ve heard he was a troubled man —
oh, he was clever with his hands,
but sorely troubled otherwise,
like a man who’s wandered out of a book.
SLEEP
There is a room, and inside the room
two old men are sitting side
by side in a pair of stuffed chairs.
I see the backs of the chairs, but a slip
of light beneath them lets me see
four heavy shoes in the front
and two heads, one bald and one gray, above.
I believe they are serious motionless men,
facing a wall with a small window.
One could be my great-grandfather,
dead for seventy years, and the other
could be his father who voted both times
for Lincoln. A window, a single pane
inside a hinged frame, is swung
open in a high-up corner
of the wall, and a plank of level light
is reaching through the square. The room
is a sizable room, and I have entered
from another room — perhaps I’m still
a figure standing in the doorway.
I don’t remember everything,
but I am breathing there and the room
is warm from an old iron stove
whose pipe runs crookedly
through another wall. In front of the men
is
