I never told them
How I’d grown up
Out in the fields.
Walking up through the woods
Beyond the swamp with cattails
And the old willow with one
Sideways trunk,
And snapweeds,
Across the stream, then up
Through old fruitless
Apple trees, through the fallen
Barbed wire into fields where cows were, or mowed, then
Planted, the really big
Tractors left out
To continue the next.
I talked to cows, some were willing and friendly.
But the songs of all sorts were there.
Later on my dad
Mentioned
The curse of Ernst Road,
But he understood how I’d walk in the hills with a Tolkien staff,
And I saw no reason ever to leave.
But I didn’t tell them much
About it, but to mention the house, and the wolfhounds,
And cricket the corgi, binky the white cat, my mother going out
To shout down hunters too close to our five acres.
These were beautiful times for me,
And no regret would ever come to me,
Before mixing it up on the school bus,
Going into town. Nancy Jaffe gave me a little black briefcase to be like my dad, going in with papers and lessons.
Later on it would be some
Form of social hindrance,
A reluctance to spend sustained time in circles. Why talk so much.
The silence and the sun and the wind across grain and alfalfa, the cow corn rows rising, the stars at night said enough.
And there was music back in the house
To come home to.
Before death.