On a day when the trees are exchanging the cured gold of the sun, And the heavy oils of darkness in the rivers of their circular hearts thicken; when desperation has entered the song of the locust; When, in abandoned farmsites, the dark stays longer In the closed parlor; a day when exhausted back-country roads, Those barges loaded with sunlight and the bodies of dead animals, Disappear into the Sand Hills under a swollen sun; A day, too, when the sizzling flies are fingering their rosaries of blood In the furry cathedrals of spent flesh, the left-over Gone-green goners from the golden summer -- THEN I know a place with three dead dogs and two dead deer in one ditch. I feel the displacement of minerals, The stone grown fossils, Under this hill of bones that calls my flesh its home. 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 TIGER, FR. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE METRICAL FEET by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME by PATRICK SARSFIELD GILMORE AN ELEGIE, OR FRIENDS PASSION, FOR HIS ASTROPHILL by MATTHEW ROYDEN |