back there to lonely silence, but once
I went and had the lonelier sense
that just before there had been singing.
PASSION
All of the sumac is scarlet now
and the thistle heads have gone to silk
and around the field the goldenrod
nods in the rain, and anything
with leaves or height is lowered. Heads
must bend and bow, I almost say,
but then I have the thought that rain —
rain, rain, rain — is the voice,
the very voice of repetition,
each splash descended from the last
in form and falling rhythm, each drop
a long, wet verse before it hits.
Rain was my season when I was a boy,
and rain in fall was best. I’d walk
across the field and find the woods
where I’d lean against a cedar tree
and listen to the steady rain.
I liked the constant sound and motion,
how that sound and motion eventually
became the same blurred expression.
But then I’d hear a second rain,
a rain of solitary drops
that fell from the branches with less precision,
yet had an independent order,
a rain that couldn’t help itself
from being strange or stirring me
to believe the first rain — steady
and unified — is necessary
for the second, the other, singular rain.
An accidental counterpart
to unity, a blind pursuit,
like all desire, for the one design —
to fall not fully from the sky
and chase the chance to fall again?
I mean falling for the darker sake
of falling one way only once
and maybe never noticed or known.
What cannot be repeated, what
will not be uniform, what breaks
away defiantly from control —
I’ve been a student of this art.
It is one of God’s better tricks
to make monotony revealing,
but disruption is a subtle craft.
Rain makes itself and makes,
through more and more, the field believe
this is eternity for now.
But more and more of anything
becomes too constant and proves too true
and, so, the eternal must change.
Eventually the rain will stop
and the goldenrod and thistle heads
will straighten, and that will be the world,
or it will seem the world. But I wonder,
I wonder if these prolific weeds
will know they have again and again
been swayed by the God who begins above
in solitude by pouring out
a bucket, an ordinary bucket?
THE GLASS EYE
Freddie Terry would take it out
and blow on it like an ember to fog
it over, and then he’d polish it
slowly on his shirttail
before setting it back in the little cave
above his cheek where it peered out
shinier now and bluer than
the good one, and when it caught the light
it flickered as if it were coming to life.
He lived with two or three brothers
in a railroad rooming house.
I’ve seen them dancing on the porch,
unbelievable as ghosts —
barefoot in overalls,
and one of them would plink and pluck
a banjo, forgoing melody
for the more mysterious sense of sound.
That house is years away in time —
it was said the brothers shared a wife.
By the end, though, they lived in public housing
without a porch and kept indoors.
Now all of them are gone from the earth.
There was no skill in the work we did,
the work, at least, didn’t ask it —
clattering down through the warehouse
with iron-wheeled ancient carts
to drag them loaded back to the dock
where the only twentieth-century fact —
a straight-box truck — waited
for loading. We’d do it again and again
until all seven trucks were gone
to the country stores which now themselves
are gone: Bottoms’s, Pottsville, Jennings’s,
Craintown, Redtop,
even the little towns have gone.
But some of the men gave skill to the work,
simply by enjoying it,
the rhythm and repetition, and then
they’d interrupt it. Freddie would take
it out around midday and squint
with his good one through the glass and say,
let’s see if I see dinnertime,
and then in the afternoon he’d fish
it out again and say, I believe
I see it, five o’clock! — holding
the eye before him like a lantern,
as though he were leading us from darkness.
CHAPEL ON THE WAY TO HOBO TOWN
One summer Belcher’s machine shop
over by the railroad tracks
blew up and burned to the ground.
It was a long, low, shambling place
and round — it looked like a feed trough
turned upside down with a square front
and the name over a sliding door
with corrugated