Between the Wars

When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon—

midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote,

read Polish history, and there was a woman

whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid

American sublime—late in the afternoon,

toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening,

the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails.

They were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes

of a requiem the massed clouds croaked

above the somber fields. Lady of eyelashes,

do you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body,

coolness of the morning, rubbed amber

and the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking,

“era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.

When I ran, it rained. The blackbirds settled

their clannish squabbles in the reeds, and light came up.

First darkening, then light. And then pure fire.

Where does it come from? out of the impure

shining that rises from the soaked odor of the grass,

the levitating, Congregational, meadow-light-at-twilight

light that darkens the heavy-headed blossoms

of wild carrot, out of that, out of nothing

it boils up, pools on the horizon, fissures up,

igniting the undersides of clouds: pink flame,

red flame, vermilion, purple, deeper purple, dark.

You could wring the sourness of the sumac from the air,

the fescue sweetness from the grass, the slightly

maniacal cicadas tuning up to tear the fabric

of the silence into tatters, so that night,

if it wants to, comes as a beggar to the door

at which, if you do not offer milk and barley

to the maimed figure of the god, your well will foul,

your crops will wither in the fields. In the eastern marches

children know the story that the aspen quivers

because it failed to hide the Virgin and the Child

when Herod's hunters were abroad. Think: night is the god

dressed as the beggar drinking the sweet milk.

Gray beard, thin shanks, the look in the eyes

idiot, unbearable, the wizened mouth agape,

like an infant's that has cried and sucked and cried

and paused to catch its breath. The pink nubbin

of the nipple glistens. I'll suckle at that breast,

the one in the song of the muttering illumination

of the fields before the sun goes down, before

the black train crosses the frontier from Prussia

into Poland in the age of the dawn of freedom.

Fifty freight cars from America, full of medicine

and the latest miracle, canned food.

The war is over. There are unburied bones

in the fields at sun-up, skylarks singing,

starved children begging chocolate on the tracks.

Source: Human Wishes (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1989)