The path into these woods begins
With tentative steps on bent grass
Widening for two to walk abreast.
The locomotives’ blaring tocsins
Grow infrequent as the years pass.
Few paths reach a place unaddressed,
Though many have been abandoned.
(Van Gogh’s led into wheat fields
Where all men’s souls are pardoned
With the harvest’s generous yields.)
It’s hard to walk on railroad ties,
The first too close, the second too far.
I walk into woods, perhaps in error,
On a path that offers no alibis.
Nature knows few right angles.
Man tends to abjure the curved.
Last night the moon swerved
To miss a cloud. The sun dangles.
The old white oak blown down,
Scattered its broken branches.
The wind passed on without a sound
In invisible avalanches.
Some windows are an open cage
Door with nothing inside to show.
Some walls mimic an empty page —
One’s painted with a golden elbow.
We know nothing we don’t realize
With or without our golden eyes.
We live where light and rust
Mount in measured layers
Like lovers without lust,
Or gods without prayers.
Who invented the bridge,
That fluvial sacrilege,
Or endless skyscrapers
Assailed by old newspapers?
They can’t blot out the sky
Or dry up the rivers —
Just twist the eye awry
Till the brainstem quivers.
Throw light on slabs of glass
And vertigoes will pass.
The slant light at sunset
Parses brick and shadow
As if they’d never met,
As if they didn’t know
They are one and the same,
Congeries with one name.
That name is fire, and fire.
The bridge rises higher
To suspend fire and wire,
Reaching from sand to mire.
So old the paint and brick,
Cooling the shadow’s wick.
All these make sun insane,
Absent mist, fog, or rain.
