In This Country

23 SWANN BRIAN SWANN IN THIS COUNTRY (i) In this country of sheer faces & overgrown quarries, dogs range so no bird dares show. They lap up the scents of animals so even their ghosts are swallowed; snuff up the wilderness into their hollow nostrils. Gunblasts catch deer just as the good star melts & draws the snow after, making brown patches the deer come to, come creaking out of their starving beds . . . (U) In this country of cold mist, one morning you wake in a gray caul. Far off, a stream starts up, as out of night, & drains the sky. In crystals round its shoulders the sky is gathered, & all the air. The blue rock is split. If a comet flowed by in her loose dress you would not know it. The deer would stand for a moment, then turn deeper into the woods. 24 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW (iii) If there is a house in these forests, ash hangs from the oakbeams in dustboltered webs. If there is a fire, steam hisses in the logs, a distant presence of the sea pouring out of its caves & cells as its level falls. In the window a plant will be dead, its leaves bunched like a fallen bird. If there is a fly, it might nuzzle into the corner of a pane like a moose-calf. Some twigs outside the window might look as if they could fly if the wind got into them. (iv) Birds. On such days you don't want to see them. You don't miss them. Birds. You resent signs of their appearance by the seedbox. Now is the time of the fieldmouse, who has eaten most of the seed and nibbled all the soap into arrowheads. Mice. Thieves, artificers, hoarders, whose cache has not diminished at the bottoms of drawers, down the backs of horsehair chairs, at the bottom of your bed. You listen to the squeaks in the roof, like the noise stars make on very cold nights. 25 SWANN (?) And yet the birds that remained are sitting in gray air, invisible, weaving together new feathers, polishing the jet of their eyes, wrapping up the opal in their throats. But all your eyes meet from time to time as you skirt the forest is a shadow left behind, just as the stars you see through clouds are only the shadows of light, decayed feathers drifting down from a bird now dead, or dying. Little doors flap in the lunar wind. (vi) Toward evening, a grind of wheels like trailbikes. A great flap of crows tears holes in the sky, black holes so strong "it's a wonder" even their cries can escape. Black crosses are nailed on the rocks, then swept off. (vii) The fly inside the lampshade makes noises like gravel tossed against a window. The lethargy of snow still sloshes round his colorless blood. He cannot wait for the wing-veins to swell & take him right into the 26 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW bulb's sun, singed, banged up, the glow all sucked out of him, spring bursting his sad black heart. BOB SYNDER BILLY GREENHORN'S TRAGEDY let me go you dog its Billy Greenhorn I love (sez Heloise to Abelard and Mark Anthony kisses Cleopatra right on top of a yawn yes yes she rolls them Egyptian eyes and sighs and sez O to have been born in the future in the province of West Virginia then I could have latched on to a REAL MAN and there he sits at midnight on the cold cold statehouse steps cheated out of the Governorship hats offhats off to the Great Beer Joint Poet ...