Beyond the Red River
Thomas McGrath


The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.

A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea,
A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses
Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping
An aging whiskey of distances and departures.

Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.
My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave.
I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe,
Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.

A Coal Fire in Winter
Thomas McGrath

Something old and tyrannical burning there.

(Not like a wood fire which is only

The end of a summer, or a life)

But something of darkness:   heat

From the time before there was fire.

And I have come here

To warm that blackness into forms of light,

To set free a captive prince

From the sunken kingdom of the father coal.

A warming company of the cold-blooded –

These carbon serpents of bituminous gardens,

These inflammable tunnels of dead song from the black pit,

This sparkling end of the great beasts, these blazing

Stone flowers diamond fire incandescent fruit.

And out of all that death, now,

At midnight, my love and I are riding

Down the old high roads of inexhaustible light.

Praises
Thomas McGrath

The vegetables please us with their modes and virtues.

                                                                                  The demure heart

Of the lettuce inside its circular court, baroque ear

Of quiet under its rustling house of lace, pleases

Us.

      And the bold strength of the celery, its green Hispanic

¡Shout! its exclamatory confetti.

                                                  And the analogue that is Onion:

Ptolemaic astronomy and tearful allegory, the Platonic circles

Of His inexhaustible soul!

                                       O and the straightforwardness

In the labyrinth of Cabbage, the infallible rectitude of Homegrown Mushroom

Under its cone of silence like a papal hat —

                                                                  All these

Please us.

                And the syllabus of the corn,

                                                            that wampum,

                                                                                   its golden

Roads leading out of the wigwams of its silky and youthful smoke;

The nobility of the dill, cool in its silences and cathedrals;

Tomatoes five-alarm fires in their musky barrios, peas

Asleep in their cartridge clips,

                                              beetsblood,

                                                                colonies of the imperial

Cauliflower, and the buddha-like seeds of the pepper

Turning their prayerwheels in the green gloom of their caves.

All these we praise: they please us all ways: these smallest virtues.

All these earth-given: 

                                 and the heaven-hung fruit also...

                                                                                    As instance

Banana which continually makes angelic ears out of sour

Purses, or the winy abacus of the holy grape on its cross

Of alcohol, or the peach with its fur like a young girl's —

All these we praise: the winter in the flesh of the apple, and the sun

Domesticated under the orange's rind.

                                                          We praise

By the skin of our teeth, Persimmon, and Pawpaw's constant

Affair with gravity, and the proletariat of the pomegranate

Inside its leathery city.

                                   And let us praise all these

As they please us: skin, flesh, flower, and the flowering

Bones of their seeds: from which come orchards: bees: honey:

Flowers, love's language, love, heart's ease, poems, praise.

     

Used up
Thomas McGrath

1.

I remember the new-dropped colts in the time when I was a boy:

The steam of their bodies in the cold morning like a visible soul,

And the crimped hairy ring of warmed grass, first circle of sleep.

Spider-legged, later, they ate sugar from my shaken, scary hand.

2.

In a few more years they were broken: their necks were circled

With a farmer’s need: with the dead leather legends and collars

                                                                        of their kin.

Gelded, the wild years cut out of them, harnessed to the world,

They walk the bright days’ black furrows and gilded seasons of use.

3.

Now, dead; swung from the haymow track with block and tackle:

Gut-slit, blood in a tub for pigs, their skin dragged over

Their heads by a team of mules. Circlet of crows:

                                                                     coyote song:

                                                                                 and bones

Rusting coulee moonlight: lush greenest spring grass where the body

Leaped.

                 Three acts and death.

                                                            The horse

                                                                                            rides

Into the earth.

Up the Dark Valley
Thomas McGrath


After the lean road looping the narrow river,
At a break in the valley, turned northward up the coulee,
Past the slow shallows where minnows, a tin flash
Patterned the trellised shadow. Then, leaving behind the last trees,
The spider sun laid on the hot face a tight miraculous web.

Northward then. All afternoon beneath my feet the ground gave
Uneven going. The colorless silence, unraveled by the flies, 
Stitched again by the locusts, was heard, was smelled —
Swamp-smell, dead coulee water.
                                                           And the easy hills,
Burnt brown, green, grass color, went on through the afternoon,
Then blue-gray in the blue shadow. The path went on.
Darkness hid in the draws. I was soon surrounded.
Only the wind sound now. All through the evening,
Homeward I walk, hearing no human sound.

The birds of darkness sang back every call.

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.

The Progress of the Soul

Thomas McGrath

Where once I loved my flesh,

That social fellow,

Now I want security of bone

And cherish the silence of my skeleton.

Where once I walked the world

Hunting the devil,

Now I find the darkness and the void

Within my side.

First to be good, then to be happy I

Worked and prayed.

Before the midnight, like the foul fiend,

I killed my dear friend.

Hope unto hope, dream beyond monstrous dream

I sought the world.

Now, at the black pitch and midnight of despair,

I find it was always there.

Such Simple Love
Thomas McGrath


All night long I hear the sleepers toss
Between the darkened window and the wall.
The madman's whimper and the lover's voice,
The worker's whisper and the sick child's call—
Knowing them all

I'd walk a mile, maybe, hearing some cat
Crying its guts out, to throttle it by hand,
Such simple love I had. I wished I might—
Or God might—answer each call in person and 
Each poor demand.

Well, I'd have been better off sleeping myself.
These fancies had some sentimental charm,
But love without direction is a cheap blanket
And even if it did no one any harm,
No one is warm.