You lean at ease in your warm house at night after supper,

listening to your daughter play the accordion. You smile

with the pleasure of a man confident in his hands, resting

after a day of long labor in the forest, the cry of the saw

in your head, and the vision of coming home to rest.

Your daughter’s face is clear in the joy of hearing

her own music. Her fingers live on the keys

like people familiar with the land they were born in.

You sit at the dinner table late into the night with your son,

tying the bright flies that will lead you along the forest streams.

Over you, as your hands work, is the dream of the still pools.

Over you is the dream

of your silence while the east brightens, birds waking close by

you in the trees.

2.

I have thought of you stepping out of your doorway at dawn,

your son in your tracks.

You go in under the overarching green branches of the forest

whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound

of your own voice

or the silence that lies around you now that you have ceased to

speak,

and soon the voice of the stream rises ahead of you, and you

take the path beside it.

I have thought of the sun breaking pale through the mists over

you

as you come to the pool where you will fish and of the mist

drifting

over the water, and of the cast fly resting light on the face of the

pool.

3.

And I am here in Kentucky in the place I have made myself

in the world. I sit on my porch above the river that flows muddy

and slow along the feet of the trees. I hear the voices of the wren

and the yellow-throated warbler whose songs pass near the

windows

and over the roof. In my house my daughter learns the womanhood

of her mother. My son is at play, pretending to be

the man he believes I am. I am the outbreathing of this ground.

My words are its words as the wren’s song is its song.

4.

Who has invented our enmity? Who had prescribed us

hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other

with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger

that I should desire the burning of your house or the

destruction of your children?

Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the

thought

that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and

rivers, and the silence of birds?

Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange

to you, and the voices of your land strange to me?

Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to

destroy you,

or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has

imagined