All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.
—Richard Wilbur, “Exeunt”
surfaces
Almost Home
“…My grandfather crossed
this sea in ’04
and never returned,
so I’ve come alone
to thank creation
as he would never
for carrying him home
to work, age, defeat,
those blood brothers
faithful to the end…”
—Philip Levine, from “My Fathers, the Baltic,” News of the World (Knopf, 2009)
(Am I almost home?)
The Wave Receding
The rocks here are volcanic. They rise from the sea—
stand above it—only to be covered by it, and then
disclosed again in the wave’s receding. The waves
sheathe the rock’s face with departure’s pattern—
then the pattern goes too…Earlier, when the tide
was low, you could have seen a lone egret walking
the zones between the rocks: entirely white; hunting;
what was it hunting? Where were you?
—Carl Phillips, from “Gold on Parchment,” Speak Low (FSG, 2009)
(More experiments with surfaces, color, and abstractions, as here: To Piceous and Back, Excision, Silver Lining, Beneath a Southern Cross.)
