In a hundred places in North Dakota Tame locomotives are sleeping Inside the barricades of bourgeois flowers: Zinnias, petunias, johnny-jump-ups -- Their once wild fur warming the public squares. Something is dying here. And perhaps I, too -- My brain already full of the cloudy lignite of eternity . . . I invoke an image of my strength. Nothing will come. Oh -- a homing lion perhaps made entirely of tame bees; Or the chalice of an old storage battery, loaded With the rancid electricity of the nineteen thirties Cloud harps iconographic blood Rusting in the burnt church of my flesh . . . But nothing goes forward: The locomotive never strays out of the flower corral The mustang is inventing barbwire the bulls Have put rings in their noses . . . The dead here Will leave behind a ring of autobodies, Weather-eaten bones of cars where the stand-off failed -- Strangers: go tell among the Companions: These dead weren't put down by Cheyennes or Red Chinese: The poison of their own sweet country has brought them here. 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 OLD SEXTON by PARK BENJAMIN THE RUNAWAY SLAVE AT PILGRIM'S POINT by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING STREET LANTERNS by MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE THE WIND ON THE HILLS by DORA SIGERSON SHORTER THE LIVING GOD by ABRAHAM IBN EZRA |