While You Are Watching

WHILE YOU ARE WATCHING / Harry Humes 1. It comes over the hill like the slightest bend of tree limbs, like first sweet rain in April. It could be a photograph in the small room, three brothers by a blue spruce. The day is Sunday, 1940. 2. Or crossing the fields at evening like a long letter, there's sweet woodruff and bloodroot, motion of plow and worm. How it all rises from the circles of fish never seen, desire of flesh and brain, the sound of first peepers in the old orchard. Or at midnight, yes, with the rain hard at the window, beyond it, below it, the whole house vibrating, the small heave of roots, the woman calling out, juice of mint and maple rising. How it all goes softly like song into all the darknesses, steadily seeking the tips of things, steadily. 20 · The Missouri Review ...