I'm now really from a very recent book of poems called,
what is it called, by the way?
Oh, Now and Then.
[LAUGHTER]
This evening hour, I might even say a recollection.
There was a graveyard once, or cemetery is more toney
now to say.
Just a field without fence, pretty far from town.
On a hill good and gravelly, so rain wouldn't stand
to disturb local residents,
though all were long past sniffles and rheumatism:
a tract of no real estate value, where flourished not
even thistle.
And the spade at the grievous chasm
would go chink on chipped flint in the dirt.
For in times forgot, here the Indian
crouched to perfect his arrowhead.
And there was a boy long after who gathered such things
among the shiny new tombstones.
Recording the first planted dead,
and now and then looking up at the buzzard's high glinting
wings.
Not thinking of flesh and its nature,
but suddenly, still for maybe two minutes; as when,
up the rise, a great through freight
strove in the pantings and clank of man's living will,
asserting itself in the face of an ignorant date.
Not morbid, nor putting 2 and 2 together to make any mystic
or fumblingly philosophical four,
he sometimes kept waiting, if decent the weather, there
low in the way, arrowheads forgotten,
till all the lights of the town had come on.
He did not know why the lights, so familiar,
now seemed so far away.
And more than once felt a crazy impulse
grow to lay ear to Earth, what voices beneath might say.