The ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew up from his path to settle in the sun-browned branches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos with its relentless valve, a tiring sound, not like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song of Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes though all the mounds in the dove-calling drought
I lived here nearly 5 years before I could meet the middle western day with anything approaching Dignity. It’s a place that lets you understand why the Bible is the way it is: Proud people cannot live here.
The land’s too flat. Ugly sullen and big it pounds men down past humbleness. They Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us, The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them— Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last. And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
They are the same aren’t they, The presumed landscape and the dream of home
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust— —I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
The autumn shade is thin. Grey leaves lie faint Where they will lie, and, where the thick green was, Light stands up, like a presence, to the sky. The trees seem merely shadows of its age. From off the hill, I hear the logging crew, The furious and indifferent saw, the slow Response of heavy pine; and I recall
It should have a woman's name, something to tell us how the green skirt of land has bound its hips. When the day lowers its vermilion tapestry over the west ridge, the water has the sound of leaves shaken in a sack, and the child's voice that you have heard below sings of the sea.
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