I cleaned the granary dust off your photo with my shirtsleeve. Now that we are tidy we can wait for the host to descend presumably from the sky as that seems to exhaust the alternatives. You had a nice summer in the granary. I was out there with you every day in June and July writing one of my six-week wonders, another novel. Loud country music on the phonograph, wasps and bees and birds and mice. The horses looked in the window every hour or so, curious and rather stupid. Chief Joseph stared down from the wall at both of us, a far nobler man than we ever thought possible. We can't lead ourselves and he led a thousand with a thousand horses a thousand miles. He was a god and had three wives when one is usually more than enough for a human. These past weeks I have been organizing myself into my separate pieces. I have the limberness of a man twice my age and this is as good a time as any to turn around. Joseph was very understanding, incidentally, when the Cavalry shot so many of the women and children. It was to be expected. Earth is full of precedents. They hang around like underground trees waiting for their chance. The fish swam around four years solid in preparation for August the seventh, 1972, when I took his life and ate his body. Just as we may see our own ghosts next to us whose shapes we will someday flesh out. All of this suffering to become a ghost. Yours held a rope, manila, straight from the tropics. But we don't reduce such glories to a mudbath. The ghost giggles at genuflections. You can't buy him a drink. Out in a clearing in the woods the other day I got up on a stump and did a little dance for mine. We know the most frightening time is noon. The evidence says I'm halfway there, such wealth I can't give away, thirty-four years of seconds. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...CAMPUS SONNET: TALK by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET DOWN BY THE CARIB SEA: 5. THE DANCING GIRL by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON BALLAD OF HUMAN LIFE by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES SOLDIER: TWENTIETH CENTURY by ISAAC ROSENBERG THE PRETTY REDHEAD by GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE |