When the Midwest sky is that old-clothes, cardboard 
Color, and the hillsides are too visible, 
In their poverty of intention, exposed, 

It is called Trent or Noel
for the most beautiful girl
turning woman on the continent.

I ask you to stay.
Here in my head I ask.
You don’t know I’m asking,

He raised his hand above his head.
His hair was a surface of gray,
his hand a semaphore.

Don’t take me home, at least not yet;
Let’s have another drink, and sit
and talk—I want to be your woman,

He believes, he believes, the gray-eyed one 
who puts your shards together. 
(Cleft saucers are mended in Vitebsk.) 

Because I want to watch them do what I would like to do
if I were free, and because it is late and I am tired
and out for what I say is my nightly walk, I stop

For peace and peace and peace the prayers ascend

From tongues in darkness sung to tongues in light

In death

If we are truly free and live in a free country,
When shall I be without this heaviness of mind?
When shall I have peace? Peace this way and peace that way?

When I wake, the sheep are eating apple peels just outside the screen, the trees are heavy, soaked, and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm, and yet somewhere inside I am not calm. We live in wooden buildings made of two by fours, making the landscape nervous for a hundred miles.