Timber
Kicking rocks in a wind tunnel path
A path I never walk,
The domain of busboys with cigarettes
Of foggy file clerk windows.
Something wobbles in me.
It’s probably the heat.
I never am right for the weather.
Walking on Fifth I watched
The city buildings drifting
Over one another,
And I fell out of place,
Suddenly a child,
Pulled into the red and black boxes,
Shut away in the slanting light-
Having known only open fields-
To pine away for my boyhood,
Like it’s a place I can return to.
My youth is a railroad town;
I scrape my heels on a gravel road,
Shewing the droning insects,
Leap a shallow ditch
To swat aside the timber
And find a hidden pond
That maybe no one knew was there.
