I spent all my summers in New Hampshire on a farm
with my grandfather and grandmother,
hanging in the afternoon, not working very hard
and working, reading, and trying to write poems in the morning.
This is when I was a kid.
And I really loved that.
I've written about it over and over again.
And I'd probably write about it the rest of my life, I suppose.
But I have a poem here called "The Table."
There was an old table back in the bedroom, a big bedroom.
I used to used to work at that table a lot
in the daytime, a big, brown, old table.
And the corners were--
had been square.
But when my mother was about three years old,
and she was at the farm, my crazy hermit cousin, Freeman,
had cut them off and rounded them
so a little girl wouldn't hit her head on the corner.
I've got it in Ann Arbor now, and write on it.
But this is "The Table."
"Walking back to the farm from the depot,
Riley slapped flies with his tail.
Twilight.
Cricket scraped in the green standing hay by the road.
The voice of my grandfather spoke
through a motion of gnats.
I held his hand.
I entered the sway of a horse.
At the brown table, I propped books on each other.
All morning in the room my skin took into itself
small discs of coolness.
Then I walked in the cut hayfield by the barn,
and lay alone in the little valley of noon heat,
in the village of little sounds.
Grasshoppers tickled my neck and I let them.
I turned into the other world that lives in the air.
Clouds passed like moats.
My grandfather clanked up the road on his mowing machine,
behind Riley, dark with sweat.
I ran to the barn and carried a bucket of water
to the loose jaws working in the dark stall.
For lunch, I sliced an onion.
Then we raked hay into mounds, and my grandfather
pitched it up where I tucked it in place on the hayrack.
My skin dried in the sun.
Wind caught me in clover.
The slow ride back to the barn, I
dangled legs over split-pole rails
while my grandfather talked forever
in a voice that wrapped me around with love
that asked for nothing.
In my room, I drank well-water that
whitened the sides of a tumbler, and coolness gathered
like dark inside my stomach.
This morning, I walk to the shaded bedroom and lean
on the drop-leaf table.
The table hums a song to itself, without sense,
and I hear the voice of the heaving ribs of Riley,
and grasshoppers haying the fields of the air."
That was before I took it back to Michigan.
It doesn't sing in Michigan, but it's all right.
I like it.