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Autumn I see the tree think it will turn Brown, and tomorrow at dawn It will change as it thinks it will change, But faster, bringing in orange, And smoking and king-killing gold. The fire ofdeath shall change colors, But before its rich images die, Some green will be thought ofin glory. The dead shall withhold it until The sleep ofthe world take on The air ofawaiting an angel To descend into Hell, and to blow With his once-a-year breath upon grass roots, And deliver the year from its thinking To the mindless one color oflife. Snow on a Southerrt State Alongside the train I labor To change wholly into my spirit, As the place ofmy birth falls upward Into the snow, And my pale, sealed face looks in From the world where it ripples and sails, Sliding through culverts, Plunging through tunnels while flakes Await my long, streaming return As they wait for this country to rise And become something else in mid-air. With a just-opened clicking, I come Forth into fresh, buried meadows Ofmuffled night light Drowning with Others / I24 Where people still sit on their porches Screened in for eternal summer, Watching the snow Like grated shadow sift Impossibly to them. Through the window I tell them dumbly That the snow is like A man, stretched out upon landscape And a spodess berth, Who is only passing through Their country, who means no harm: Who stars in distrust at his ghost Also flying, feet first, through the distance. Numbly, the lips ofhis spirit Move, and a fur-bearing steeple looms up Through the heart ofhis mirrored breast. The small town where he was born Assembles around it, The neon trying, but obviously unreal, The parked cars clumsily letting Pureness, a blinding burden, Come slowly upon them. All are still, all are still, For the breath-holding window and I Only must move through the silence, Bearing my huge, prone ghost Up, out, and now flying over The vapor-lamp-glowing high school Into the coming fields Like a thing we cannot put down. Yet the glass gives out ofmy image And the laid clicking dies, as the land All around me shines with the power Ofrenewing my youth By changing the place where I lived it. Snow on a Southern State / I 25 There is nothing here, now, to watch The bedclothes whirl into flakes. What should be warm in these blankets Has powdered down into its own Steel-blue and feathery visions Ofweddings opposed by the world: Is hovering over A dead cotton field, which awaits Its touch as awaiting completion: Is building the pinewoods again For this one night oftheir lives: With the equilibrium Ofbones, is falling, falling, Falling into the river. To Landrum GuYJ Beginning to Write atSixty One man in a house Consumed by the effort oflistening, Sets down a worried phrase upon a paper. It is poor, though it has come From the table as out ofa wall, From his hand as out ofhis heart. To sixty years it has come At the same rate oftime as he. He cannot tell it, ever, what he thinks. It is time, he says, he must Be thinking ofnothing but singing, Be singing ofnothing but love. But the right word cannot arrive Through the dark, light house ofone man With his savage hand on a book, With a cricket seizing slowly on his ear: Drowning with Others / I2 6 ...

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