In an afternoon bright with September, or in an old dissension bright with fear, I went wandering where there was purity in white lady's tresses, hiddenness in peeping bluebottle gentians, and where many species of goldenrod and asters made funeral for the lost summer world, and ferns, taken by frost, made russet the fields and turned the waysides yellow and brown. It struck me that I had wandered all my years like this, half a century, searching for the touch that heals, but there is no touch; searching everywhere for the look that says @3I know@1, but there is no look. This is Vermont, the land hidden from violent times, far from the center of life, they say. I walk by the gray brook, around the knoll, through the pines. Winter is coming. Searching, searching with my hand, I feel September's little knives, and with my eyes I see bright spattered leaves in the matted grass. I hear this song, if it be a song: these insistent little bright fearful hesitant murmurs from high in the old pine trees. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE WASTE LAND (1-5, COMPLETE) by THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT OH! SUSANNA! by STEPHEN COLLINS FOSTER ON THE HOME GUARDS; WHO PERISHED ... LEXINGTON, MISSOURI by HERMAN MELVILLE AN OLD WOMAN (2) by MOTHER GOOSE THE SOLITARY TOMB by BERNARD BARTON LEMNISCUS AD COLUMNAM S. SIMEONIS STYLITAE APPENSUS by JOSEPH BEAUMONT PETRUCHIO'S WIFE by AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR |