with no use of forceps

delivering the brain-child

to wriggle in black ink on white paper

Doctor Williams saying often to himself,

“Good babies make good poems.”

From an Illinois Prairie Hut

For Amy Lowell

She regrets a lost town in Vermont,

lost streets of her childhood town in Vermont;

grassroots tugging at the streets and taking Main Street

of her childhood town, the old home town, in Vermont,

these she regrets,

and each regret is a grassroot

and a grassroot must be strong and bitter.

She regrets a horse chestnut,

a tree with a torso ten people join hands and circle round,

a buckeye dying, a tough and beautiful horse chestnut dying,

she regrets this storm of white blossoms will not paint the summer sky when the buckeye is gone—

and each regret

is a high thin goose of autumn

crying south, crying south.

She fixes the millimeters of her glasses herself;

She measures the curve of her eyesight wishing to measure

The curve of the arch of the sky of night, the curve of the running hours on the level of night,

And the moon stumbles of early morning and the testimony of the dawn across the first light sheets.

She measures the millimeters of her eyesight with regrets

and each regret is a grassroot

and each regret is a high thin goose of autumn crying south.

Letters to Dead Imagists

Emily Dickinson:

You gave us the bumblebee who has a soul,

The everlasting traveler among the hollyhocks,

And how God plays around a back yard garden.

Stevie Crane:

War is kind and we never knew the kindness of war till you came;

Nor the black riders and clashes of spear and shield out of the sea,

Nor the mumblings and shots that rise from dreams on call.

Illinois Farmer

Bury this old Illinois farmer with respect.

He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields.

Now he goes on a long sleep.

The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib,

The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn.

Osawatomie

I don’t know how he came,

shambling, dark, and strong.

He stood in the city and told men:

My people are fools, my people are young and strong, my people

must learn, my people are terrible workers and fighters.

Always he kept on asking: Where did that blood come from?

They said: You for the fool killer,

you for the booby hatch

and a necktie party.

They hauled him into jail.

They sneered at him and spit on him,

And he wrecked their jails,

Singing, “God damn your jails,”

And when he was most in jail

Crummy among the crazy in the dark

Then he was most of all out of jail

Shambling, dark, and strong,