I believe they are serious motionless men,
facing a wall with a small window.
One could be my great-grandfather,
dead for seventy years, and the other
could be his father who voted both times
for Lincoln. A window, a single pane
inside a hinged frame, is swung
open in a high-up corner
of the wall, and a plank of level light
is reaching through the square. The room
is a sizable room, and I have entered
from another room — perhaps I’m still
a figure standing in the doorway.
I don’t remember everything,
but I am breathing there and the room
is warm from an old iron stove
whose pipe runs crookedly
through another wall. In front of the men
is a table, maybe made from a crate.
That is where, I remember now, I left
the book I had been reading, and now
I see it — Progress? — the one-word
question running down its spine.
The men are staring at the book,
and I suppose they’ve wondered, too,
because they made the room and the window;
in the hill behind the house they dug
the root cellar and lined it with stone.
The window is high to catch the light
as soon as the sun comes over the hill,
and the house is there because of the hill.
Beside the house is a bottom patch —
my father plowed it with a mule.
And by these signs is how I know
I’ve been asleep. I’ve been to the room
with two old men inside, and a stove,
and a book; and a light, before it tilts
to flood the room, is still a stream
trickling through the window,
and the window, God knows why, is swung
into the room like an open gate.
The room of the time before my time
was hewed and hammered together from sleep;
but a glimpse of some other time was left.
I saw it from the doorway where
I stood as solemn as a tree,
as if I were growing in the dream.
THE MAN IN THE COUNTRY OF HIS DREAM
I’m going around in the green shade,
now, making shapes in the air —
see that, now that’s a house up there,
and there’s the little chimney — ’weep,
’weep, remember William Blake?
Bless his dream! God bless
chimneys, too — and here’s a goat
named Mattie, and there’s a pair
of dominicker hens, the one
on the left is Lulu and on
the right is Aunt Mabel, though
I call them the Girls — hey, speaking of
there’s one in the doorway now — she’s
the lady here and looky there
at them long legs! — it’s okay,
we can use bad grammar, we’re
in love — and see that little peek-
aboo tugging the lady’s skirt?
cute as a bug that one — bless
them all forever, bless their hearts —
and don’t forget the dogs, all four —
now over there’s the pawpaw patch,
but I didn’t make it up, it’s real,
and so’s the wahoo tree down yonder.
MODERNITY
In the old days people got
old, and age diminished them
or not depending on how one thought
of age. Is age a number that
declines with mere increase, against
the grain of simple arithmetic,
in denial of the facts of the force
that brings the rings around the hearts
of trees wider and wider out?
Or is age a complicated way
to give time a true description,
and from that attitude to feel
a thought like an old fish in a pool
swim up, or rise like bubbles floating
from a turtle sinking to the bottom
of a pond? A long time ago
I knew a man named Jonah Payne
who, when the rural electric came,
had said he was too old to get it.
Yet he lived another forty years
or so, beyond the advent of
the age when light could be called forth
with a switch. He switched his fields around —
but that procedure took more time
and thought. By eminent domain
the towers and long transmission lines
divided the sky from the ground beneath it.
It was a mistake, said Mr. Payne,
to hitch up time that way, to take
away its weight and leave an instant.
These observations came to him
at night, when by the stars and moon
he rose to a ridge above the world
and the lights splayed below were few
and innocent enough to look back
at him like a creature whose eyes have for
a moment caught the light of the moon.
But even Jonah Payne, you see,
came to me in a dream, a light
in his own right reflected from
a moon that made its arc across
the sky of sleep — he was a man
whose age was older than his time,
and that is how it used to be.
But now it is another time,
a shorter one, without