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THE SHEEP CHILD Farm boys wild to couple With anything with soft-wooded trees With mounds ofearth mounds Ofpinestraw will keep themselves off Animals by legends oftheir own: In the hay-tunnel dark And dung of barns, they will Say I have heard tell That in a museum in Atlanta Way back in a corner somewhere There's this thing that's only half Sheep like a woolly baby Pickled in alcohol because Those things can't live his eyes Are open but you can't stand to look I heard from somebody who ... But this is now almost all Gone. The boys have taken Their own true wives in the city, The sheep are safe in the west hill Pasture but we who were born there Still are not sure. Are we, Because we remember, remembered In the terrible dust ofmuseums? Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may Be saying saying I am here, in myfather's house. I who am halfofyour world, came deeply To my mother in the longgrass Ofthe westpasture, where she stood like moonlight Falling 109 110 Listeningforfoxes. It was something like love From another world that seized her From behind, andshegave, not lifting her head Out ofdew, without ever looking, her best Selfto thatgreat need. Turned loose, she dipped herface Farther into the chill ofthe earth, and in a sound Ofsobbing ofsomethingstumbling Away, began, as she must do, To carry me. I woke, dying, In the summer sun ofthe hillside, with my eyes Far more than human. I sawfor a blazing moment The greatgrassy worldfrom both sides, Man and beast in the round oftheir need, And the hill windstirred in my wood, My hoofand my hand clasped each other, I ate my one meal Ofmilk, and died Staring. From dark grass I came straight To myfather's house, whose dust Whirls up in the hallsfor no reason When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner, And, through my immortal waters, I meet the sun'sgrains eye To eye, and theyfail at my closet ofglass. Dead, I am mostsurely living In the minds offarm boys: I am he who drives Them like wolvesfrom the hound bitch and calf Andfrom the chaste ewe in the wind. They go into woods into beanfields they go Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming ofme, They groan they wait they suffer Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind. ...

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