Country Music: Selected Early Poems

Sky Valley Rider

Sky Valley Rider Same place, sameauto-da-fe: Late August, the air replete, the leaves Grotesque in their limp splendor, The dust like guilt on the window sills, On the pressed pants of suits Hung like meat on their black hooks: I walked these roads once, two steps Behind my own life, my pockets stuffed with receipts For goods I'd never asked for: Complacency, blind regret; belief; Compassion I recognized in the left palm; Respect, slick stick, in the right: One I have squandered, one I have sloughed like a cracked skin; the others, Small charms against an eventual present, I keep in the camphor box Beside my handkerchiefs, the slow roll Of how I'll unravel, signatures. #• The tinkly hymns, the wrong songs: This one's for you, 15, lost On the wide waters that circle beneath the earth; You touched me once, but not now, Your fingers like blue streamers, the stump Of your hand, perhaps, in time to that music still: Down by the haying shed, the white pines Commence with their broomy sounds; The orchard, the skeletal trunks on Anne's Ridge 39 —Stone and stone-colored cloud— Gather the light and hold fast; Two thousand acres of loneliness: Leaf over leaf, the green sky: Sycamore, black gum, oak, ash; Wind-scythe at work in the far fields; In the near, plum-flameof larkspur: Whatever has been, remains— Fox fire, pale semaphore in the skull's night. -xThe past, wrecked accordion, plays on, its one tune My song, its one breath my breath, The square root, the indivisible cipher . . . 40 ...