Comforts of Granite

Comforts of granite, lichened and silvery as plush
Warming a paisley hill, or else the corn
In juba raised, soprano seven o'clock
Of an August morning drenched in dew, or else . . .
When I am old I’ll say these were a world.
See how the light in my remembrance hums
With gnatlike tensions where the willows burn,
Bronzen in noon. And more, more. The lost boy
Whose felt simplicities create the land,
Our land, kneels in his dark corner, takes
A quaint brown volume from the shelf of home,
Meaningless now, the dear and envied Greek.
I think I articled my works and days
For honest poems built to an honest land,
But some plowed beach and some the asphalt yard,
And who grew least it’s difficult to say.
Measure us now, old earth. Renunciations
Bloom in the wisdom of a failed desire,
Autumnal failure looming forever now.
Something there is Novembers us and lays
The shriveling memories blackly at our feet.
Seconds puke with change. The highway’s cord,
The suburb’s fishnet spread—entelechies
Extending, searching, strangling, burying.
Land was like an intuition of history,
Mysterious as a navel, mostly hidden,
Ballast fuel in the mind’s deep bunkers.
Grown up half way or less, I knew the change,
A sister crying somewhere in the sky;
But I forgot—experience possesses
Its innate anesthesia. So I have heard
Others remark before me, other survivors,
Enemies and friends. Fa la, fa la,
Henceforth I shall recite in gaudy tones
My chansons to the god of cities, fa la!
Though I can hear my old black mongrel Jock
Barking somewhere on the other side of the woods.