From: Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part III
Thomas McGrath


6.

Green permission...
                                 Dusk of the brass whistle...
Gooseberry dark.
Green moonlight of the willow.
Ironwood, basswood and the horny elm.
June berry; box-elder; thick in the thorny brake
The black choke cherry, the high broken ash and the slick
White bark of poplar.
                                 I called the king of the woods,
The wind-sprung oak.
I called the queen of ivy,
Maharani to his rut-barked duchies;
Summoned the foxgrape, the lank woodbine,
And the small flowers: the wood violets, the cold
Spears of the iris, the spikes of the ghostflower—
It was before the alphabet of the trees
Or later.
Runeless I stood in the green rain
Of the leaves.
Waiting.
                                     Nothing.
                                     Echo of distant horns.
Then
Under the hush and whisper of the wood,
I heard the echoes of the little war.
A fox barked in the hills; and a red hawk boomed
Down on the darkening flats in a feathery splash of hunger.
Silence and waiting.
The rivery rustle
Of a hunting mink.
Upstream in the chuckling shallows
A beaver spanked the water where, in its time,
The dam would be where my brother, now in his diapers,
Would trap for the beaver's grandsons.
I could not
See in that green dark.
                                     I went downstream
Below the crossing where I'd swum the midnight river
On my way home from a move.
I put my clothes
Stinking with sweat and dusty (I thought:
How the dust had jumped from Cal's shirt!)
I put them on the broken stump.
I dived from the hummock where the cut-bank crumbled.
Under the river the silence was humming, singing:
Night-song.
In the arrest and glaucous light
Delicate, snake-like, the water-weed waved and retracted.
The water sang. The blood in my ears whistled.
I roared up out of the river into the last of the sunlight.
Then: I heard the green singing of the leaves;
The water-mystery,
The night-deep and teasing terror on the lone river
Sang in my bones,
And under its eves and seas I broke my weeping,
In that deeper grieving,
The long, halting— the halt and the long hurry—
Towards the heaving, harsh, the green blurring of the salt
                                                                                       mysterious sea.