It was a winter of storms,

when after midnight

the only thing in the streets

was the cinder truck,

its tire chains grinding at ice

dark through with cinders.

I walked across the mountain,

the streets all tilted

curb to curb,

the tire ruts too deep

and not wide enough

to walk in.

On the Harrison Street Bridge

there was still no high screen

to stop the suicides.

Hugging the stone banister,

I could hear far below

the ice on the Roaring Brook

cracking like axed wood.

That winter I noticed

that the greening soldier

at the far end of the bridge

had holes for eyes--

that when I stood near enough,

I could hear the wind

whistling through his heart.

Like a sardine tin.

Not round like a can of corn,

beets, or even tuna,

it's more like a box

back in a dresser drawer,

a small reposit

for buttons and stubs,

threads and odd hairs,

the bequests of frayed

recollection.

The key, soft-soldered

to the bottom

so that a fingernail

can free it,

has the slender simplicity

sufficient, in most cases,

for survival.

Indeed, it serves well

some need of the spirit

to slip the key slot

over the tab end of the seal

and turn a tight coil

from the soft sides and rounded

corners of the tin,

to spy the silvered sides

packed, headless, gill to tail

under a level gleam of oil.

In the night's first hour,

the light from the Barber's Shop

at the Butztown Corners

angles out like a trapezoid

desperate for a square's certitude.

Around it, the air hangs blacker

than the black ground--asphalt

with the knobby night contours

of a lawn left for years

to the heat, the rain, the frost.

Inside, the Barber steps to his chair

and rearranges the vinyl apron,

draping it over the arm,

smoothing its folds as if they

are the essence of some thing

more durable than hope.

It is not what one expects

out among the dark, flat farms.

The sign is the only light

for more than a mile--

the baby blue and pink bulbs

do not need to blink,

match the curtains closed

across the two big windows.

There is a small spotlight

over the blue door,

but it has been so angled

that the doorway is shadowed.

Several nights a week

I pass by, going home--

always the gravel lot

is empty, almost desolate

in its fuzzy hues;

always the dark pick-up

sits alone

well away from the door.

And each time I pass

I try to imagine

the woman inside--

waiting out the hours

that clothe her

like a flimsy robe.

It stands upright

beside the interstate,

with several hundred acres

of winter wheat between it

and the nearest farmhouse.

It looks nicely broken in,

not worn--its laces loosened

and its tongue bent forward

as if it had been removed

and set down with care.

It is one of that scattered

tribe of shoes that gather

on the berms, hoping perhaps

to catch the eye of a sock

in need of succor or, even yet,

a glimpse of the mate

that must by now be counted

hopelessly lost.

In rural Ohio, most

of the rail crossings

are marked by neither

flashing lights nor gates.

As a result, only Texas

has more wrecks

and more fatalities.

One night last week,

a pickup truck slammed

into a train traveling

forty-five miles per hour.

The truck was pulled under

a full car of grain and then

dragged along the rails

for the four miles

needed to stop the train.

The remains of the driver

were ejected into the growth

of scrub between the tracks

and several fields in which

the corn stalks had been

recently plowed under.

Late in the afternoon

of the following day,

I stopped at the crossing

on my way home--looked

both ways down the empty

miles of track--put the car

in reverse and backed onto

the soft and narrow berm.

The nearest building

was several fields away.

The wind was cold,

and the only sound came

from the brittle branches

of the scrub scratching

against each other.

I walked the four miles

along one side of the rails

and then back along the other.

I found a very few tiny

pieces of plastic and glass,

and I knew that I had gone

the four miles when the rails

lost their very silver sheen.

When I got back to my car,

it was almost dark.

It was a lonely place to die,

and yet in some ways pristine.

The rail bed was litter-free,

a very nearly forgotten

corridor where season passed

into season with the occasional

passing of the train.

High cloud filled

the closing sky.

Mist crept from the banks,

seemed to catch

on the low-hanging branches.

I stood waist-deep

in the thick water,

waist-deep

in the sweet weed.

In the last line of sunlight,

a mosquito moved

like a needle of blood.

I felt the bullhead

take the minnow--

felt its first terror

of the hook.

I pulled hard,

waited,

pulled again.

Somebody around the bend

in the shoreline

muttered loudly,

"You lousy son-of-a-bitch!"

From an open car

crossing the dirt bridge,

a woman ribboned out

her laughter.

In the late sunlight,

the water deep in the quarry

thickens to the color

of a copper roof

greening under seasons

of steady drizzle.

In the late sunlight,

the gray walls show in shadowed relief

the long grooves

of pickaxe and chisel,

the signatures of hard hands

that knew the slow pain of stone.

In the late sunlight,

the sounds from the hidden road

seem to catch like fabric

in the branches of the wiry trees

gathered along the rim

like the wasted descendants of toil.

On the sidewalk

I stop before a piece of bone--

part of an animal's leg,

the ball of a joint

and the shaft tapering

to a violent fracture.

It is not the sort of bone

that comes with a cut of meat.

It is not the sort of bone

one feeds to the dog.

Sun-bleached and clean,

it belongs in a desert,

at the edge of a trail--

where blood surrenders

to the sere accidents

of barren ground,

where bone loses

all fleshly aspect

and finds its essence

among gravel, sand, and stone.

Two heron stand

motionless

at the very end

of the stone jetty.

The sky behind them

is low and solidly

gray, and the lake

beyond them

floats up a mist

the blackening green

of old spinach.

I am almost upon them

before I see

their spare silhouettes.

Each out of one

widening eye

takes measure of me,

pretends indifference.

I settle on my haunches,

let the smells of lake

and water bird

gradually filter

through me.

Slowly the dusk

extends into night

like a shadow

lengthening

and deepening

through the gray.

Enclosed then

in the darkness,

in the chill whorl

of thickening mist,

I hear the heavy wings

shake out their folds

and, in the effort

of their lift,

the dream progeny

of sky and lake and stone

move yet again

across the boundaries

of bone and blood

and into the great flyways,

into the tidal airs

of the hidden moon.

I pick up a metal crate

in which dry clothes

folded or rolled in a hurry

had waited for skin

for skin towel-dried and warming

but still beaded here and there

with the cold, chlorine-rich

water of the pool as deep perhaps

as deep perhaps as the ragged

pits in the nearby woods

from which the brown stone

had been muscled and then

and then fractured with sledge

and chisel and squared to lie

edge to edge to edge within

the steep pattern of the walls

the walls against which the swimmers'

toes had brushed and found

the fine marks left by the chisels,

the fine marks that the water

would have worn away eventually--

if there had been more time

for the water to move against the stone

with the gentle persistence of toes.

In a heavy rain

the burgundy leaves

fall on the walk

and adhere.

After several days

of high sun,

the man with the blower

comes and sends them

swirling to the bare

corner of the lawn

where they burn

with a heavy smell

that hangs in the lungs.

On the walk,

their outlines remain,

tarnished gray,

with some fragile

details perfectly

preserved--

in a small way

a record of the awful

serenity of sorrow,

as in the shadows

on the stones

of Hiroshima.

My windows opened,

wind whips

from the furnace hues

of sunset

in Indian Summer.

I drive the mountain,

swerve through curves

that torque my spirit

to the season.

Then, reduced to draft

through glass doors

that open

with a footstep--

that, pushing closed,

then strip the air

of motion,

I enter the Center.

I squint

into the dull glare--

the lucent skin

of colorless tile,

floor and wall and ceiling--

where motion is but

the sheen in the whirl

of spoked wheels.

The headlights glance

off the cold macadam

just as a glass sometimes

falls from a high shelf

and strikes a hard floor

and does not shatter.

The road is narrow

and deserted,

and the land is broad.

Beyond the graveled berms,

the ditches run,

shallow

and yet deep in shadows.

At the bottom, there must

be ice--

though I cannot see it

or touch it

or even hear it

scratching at the low-

slung belly of the wind.

Out of the coarse grass

fly leaves

and pieces of leaves.

Back in the darkness

the bare trees

have locked their branches

like the antlers

of bull elk in rut,

stand like moonlight

with all of the air

knocked out of it,

with all of the light

gone except for what

the roots require

to find their way.

In the distance,

several small lights

flicker

and signify nothing--

not even

that nothing

but blind persistence

on which our fragile

dreams depend.

As though propelled by fear of freezing,

which may be, too, a longing for the deep heat of late-July,

the insect moves through the chilly air--

moves toward the white circle of sunlight on the windshield.

Its splatter is liquid and clear,

so clear that it might be mistaken for a stray raindrop

if not for the one undamaged leg

kicking furiously against the hard rush of air.

Though deceased, my aunts

still absorb their husbands' blows,

as if it were they who had gone

soft-jawed and loose-jointed with drink,

and the fine cracks shoot out

from the shocks to the plaster,

and the shelves' emptiness

thuds on the new linoleum,

and the carpet folds up underfoot

and, in its loopy fall, the hard skull

pulls the surprise through the curse

cut short when it strikes the harder floor.

In deep afternoon

the sun lies low in the sky,

just above the clouds

that rim the long horizon

like hills thick

with pine-shadowed mist.

From the broad, flat fields

knee-deep in new powder,

snow-devils swirl upward,

stagger like half-frozen

hobos toward the windbreaks

of pygmy spruce and bare thorn.

The late sunlight

casts an acetylene glare

across the cold, thin air.

Yet, in the darkening, eastern

sky above Findlay, Ohio,

thousands of geese circle,

some of the great formations

passing across the dim

and distant face

of the solstice moon.

Now that the angler has died,

will the pickerel, gliding

like the shadows of shadows

through the cold, unmeasured

spaces of his hidden lake,

feed more easily?

A compact man,

he moved as though he would live

to a great Hebraic age.

His old hair was soft as down.

Now, in the white shed

behind his house, where a pony

was kept when he was a boy,

the high windows on every side

let the sunlight spill inside,

but the hot air lifts to the closed panes.

On the shelves the tackle rests,

the iridescent lures lying side by side

in trays that fold into boxes

latched against the dust and damp.

Last afternoon, I sat in his livingroom,

beside the rented hospital bed.

As he dozed, I thought how little the dying

sleep in the deep dreams of those

whose travails have left their souls

with something succulent to chew on.

I dwelled on how his sun-browned skin

lay in folds across his bones,

on how in the space of weeks

the life between had simply vanished--

on how little we can know

who know so little of our own flesh.

This morning, as I sat on the porchstep,

his wife came outside and lit a cigarette.

"How is he today," I asked.

"He's gone," she said and then exhaled.

The smoke spills from the stack

of the pet-food plant,

strikes the arctic air

and billows into great plumes of steam,

which have nothing to fuel them

but the last breath of fire

and so collapse

as suddenly as old men in their shoveling

beneath the terrible tonnage of cold.

Across from the state penitentiary

stands a white country church.

On three sides, it is surrounded

by corn fields that slope

to a tree-lined stream.

Even in the dry months, the water

courses loudly among iron-red stones.

These might have muscled their way

up through the stream bed,

as molars push through the gum.

Yet it may also be magical

that the silt has simply sifted away

year by year through a century

of spring floods, laying them bare

like the giant vertebrae

of some primeval lizard

that died heavier than mud.

At noon each day

the church bell tolls,

and each night the prison horn

marks lockdown.

In these two sounds,

there is much to remind us

of what we hope for

and what we fear from ourselves.

But in the sound of the water

on the stones, there is a thing

perhaps more subtle and profound--

the rhythm of time unmeasured,

the bass tones of eons

into which our greatest clamors

have passed with the mute fervor

of silent prayer.