Country Music: Selected Early Poems

Hardin County

Hardin Countv --CPW, 1904-1972 There are birds that are parts of speech, bones That are suns in the quiek earth. There are ice floes that die of cold. There are rivers with many tloors, and names That pull their thread from their own skins. Your grief was something like this. Or self-pity, I might add, as you did When you were afraid to sleep, And not sleep, afraid to touch your bare palm, Afraid of the wooden dog, the rose Bleating beside your nightstand; afraid Of the slur in the May wind. It wasn't always like that, not in those first years When the moon went on without its waters, When the cores blew out of their graves in Hardin County. How useless it is to cry out, to try And track that light, now Reduced to a grain of salt in the salt snow. I want the dirt to go loose, the east wind To pivot and fold like a string. I want the pencil to eat its words, The star to be sucked through its black hole. And everything stays the same, Locks unpicked, shavings unswept on the stone floor. 77 The grass reissues its green music; the leaves Of the sassafras tree take it and pass it on; The sunlight scatters its small change. The dew falls, the birds smudge on their limbs. And, over Oak Hill, the clouds, those mansions of nothingness, Keep to their own appointments, and hurry by. 78 ...