This is one more Deep Lane poem.
I don't think I need to tell you a thing about this one.
"Deep Lane"-- and I recommend this to-- those of you who
write poetry, I recommend this technique highly.
It's hard to write-- come up with a title for every poem you
write.
Keep generating them.
It's useful.
"Deep Lane."
I'm resting on a bench in the cemetery
while Ned scrawls his self delighted wild boy
trace over the slopes of grass, but we can't stay long,
since it's a day I need to go into the city,
and when I stand up suddenly, my left legs
half a foot lower than my right because I've
stepped into the sunken newly filled grave of one Herbert
Meyer.
I don't know it then, but that's when
the wind blows up from beneath.
I think I'm just off balance and make a joke of it
later, telling people my day began
with falling into a grave, and where can you go from there?
Later, a storm blows down the moraine, crisp and depth
charged with ozone and exhilaration,
chills my face and arms with a wind I've already met,
winds up the lanes and rattles the cups in the cabinet,
bends the beauty berry and Joe Pye weed down
in the direction of beautiful supplication.
The maple and walnut sway in the highest regions of themselves.
Leaves circling in air like the great curtains
of bubbles blown by the humpback to encircle
the delicious schools.
Blows in my sleep and blows while I'm cooking.
Blows while I read and when I kiss, does it ever blow then.
The wind not particular to Mr. Meyer nor anyone else
and thus the nervy thrill of its invitation.
To be unbound, not at all what you thought.
To rush up from the sinking Earth
on a gust of investigation.
Now go beat the crooked little house and the cracks
in the shingles.
Tunnel your hour as the mouse in the stale loaf,
fly back to the strong hands of the baker,
further back into the wheat, forward
into the belly of the mouse child.
What reason to ever end?
I know one.
If you don't hold still, you can have joy after joy,
but you can't stay anywhere to love.
That's the price that wind-- that rib rattling
wind waiting to sweep you up, that's the price the wind pays.