TWO WORKS
BY JEFF GUNDY
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ON THE GREEN TRAIL
Who needs a cathedral
when you’ve got the flat woods?
Who needs a square when you’ve got brown pasture
and the smell of cows?
Who needs a statue when the broken oak
stands pure and monumental as grace abandoned,
the mud shines at the water’s edge?
Any stray sound could be boys breaking sticks
or clambering up the cables of the bridge.
The stray bends dazzle because we know
nothing of what lies around them.
What was it that we sang--
a crow in the maple, two in the honey locust?
The male cardinal is an excellent father
making many trips with food for the young.
In this commonplace and priceless sliver
of time and space
any shiver in the dirty creek
is Old John rising
to bring us bliss & woe--
This is something sing the crows.
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LETTER FROM RAGDALE TO J.
I've seen three lost gloves on the trails--one purple, one blue,
and a leather work glove stuck lifelike and grasping on a branch
in the north lane. I almost took it just because it frightened me.
I come and go simple as rain, eat and drink what I please.
I sit at the table between the four windows and the door
to the porch. I'm not all here, she said, or was it I'm not myself?
The train rattles off through the rain. So many books--I gnaw
like a raccoon in the sweet corn, throw them down. Last night
it was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the need to bear
"the true proportions of the savageness of the world."
It's not hard to bear anything in this fine substantial place,
where people I don't know have paid my board and room.
Behind the house is the meadow, then the prairie, then the river
and the woods, the train tracks, the highway. The world
is very old. There are many hours in a life, many nights.
I don't want to fall asleep. Past the train tracks there is
only silence and the cold of space. Past the cold space
there is nothing, nothing. On the other side of nothing
are a million creatures. They breathe and hunt, ripen
and fall. There is a crust on nothing and we call it sweet.
There is another and we call it low. There is another and we have
no word but we eat it, slowly, we must drink and breathe and
never see or know it, the walls of the house and the hard floor
and the sweat burning in the lovers' eyes and the wet muck
into which the seed is pushed, again, again, what use, go away,
God bless you, step in, go away, oh please, sit down, sit down.