The Snowbound City

I believe in this stalled magnificence,
this churning chaos of traffic,
a beast with broken spine,
its hoarse voice hooded in feathers
and mist; the baffled eyes
wink amber and slowly darken.

Of men and women suddenly walking,
stumbling with little sleighs
in search of Tibetan houses—
dust from a far-off mountain
already whitens their shoulders.

When evening falls in blurred heaps,
a man losing his way among churches
and schoolyards feels under his cold hand
the stone thoughts of that city,

impassable to all but a few children
who went on into the hidden life
of caves and winter fires,
their faces glowing with disaster.

Cicada
I sank past bitten leaves,
tuning in a shell my song
of the absent and deaf.

And that pain came alive
in the dark, shot
with the torment of seeds,
root-ends and wiry elbows.

II

A whisper, dry and insane,
repeating like a paper drum
something I was,
something I might become:

a little green knife
slitting the wind upstairs,
or a husk in the sod.

III

It was late summer
in the grass overhead.
I wanted wings and a voice,
my own tree to climb,

and someone else to answer,
clear across
loud acres of sun.

The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer
Nothing bestial or human remains
in all the brass and tin
that we strike and break and weld.

Nothing of the hand-warmed stone
made flesh, of the poured heat
filling breast, belly, and thigh.

The craft of an old affection
that called by name the lion shape
of night, gave rain its body

and the wind its mouth—the owl
in the mask of the dreamer,
one of the animal stones asleep . . .

By tinker and by cutting torch
reduced to a fist of slag,
to a knot of rust on a face of chrome.

So, black dust of the grinding wheels,
bright and sinewy curl of metal
fallen beneath the lathe:

Speak for these people of drawn wire
striding toward each other
over a swept square of bronze.

For them the silence is loud
and the sunlight is strong.

No matter how far they walk
they will never be closer.

Copyright © 1993 by John Haines. All rights reserved.