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Winifred Welles
No, I shall never climb above the hill,
But, wistful, pause halfway and take my fill
Of wondering —
Behind me lies the valley, hot and still,
A roof-scarred thing.
If, like a lagging cloud with slow, white feet,
I should surmount the hill, would I then greet
The spray-wreathed sea?
And would the eager winds blow keen and sweet
Up, up to me?
Halfway, my craven heart shall ever bide.
Content in hoping that the other side
Shines on a silver shore,
Yet fearful lest the high hills only hide
More vale — and nothing more.
the longer you gaze at the face
of a limestone cliff
the more beasts
begin to emerge
a puzzle of muzzles
a marl of snarls
don’t call them angelic
they’re not here for you
convening as if
to meditate on a corpse
where the creek makes a brief
above-ground appearance
oh white-breasted nuthatch
with your anxiety song
who’s to say what’s real
in a valley full of sinkholes
The soft notes
of a blue-headed vireo
lure me away from my desk.
Night’s dust on my glasses
turns to a veil of gauze
in the noon-time sun.
The stench of manure
wafts up from the valley.
The vireo snatches insects from the air.
Clouds pull their shadows
across the snow-filled valley
as if dragging for a drowned swimmer.
I watch from the ridge,
mesmerized by the alternation
of gloom and glare.
The No Hunting sign rattles
on the electric pole
above the deep claw-marks of bears.
the father's face comes broken at the face of the water
face to face they flow to the valley
water and father
The sound of the closing outside door was all.
You made no sound in the grass with your footfall,
As far as you went from the door, which was not far;
But you had awakened under the morning star
The first song-bird that awakened all the rest.
He could have slept but a moment more at best.
Already determined dawn began to lay
In place across a cloud the slender ray
For prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight,
And loosing the pent-up music of over-night.
But dawn was not to begin their ‘pearly-pearly’
(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early,
Before it changes to diamonds in the sun),
Neither was song that day to be self-begun.
You had begun it, and if there needed proof--
Some valleys you passed through replaced
themselves in memory.
Their mystique deepens like loam.
A glacier of forgetting moved into others.
You never know: should mind’s climate
change, these might be recalled.
You cannot remember entering even
one valley without having felt changed:
Maybe you sensed descent into routine,
or escape into meadowed ease—
or knew involvement with anonymous
mass humanity lay ahead, urban sea.
You entered that one valley—remember?—
by train. A pleading wish to be from that valley
seized you, a wish not be you.
As you gazed on and out, your forehead
Please open the gray door,
follow lavender light
all the way down
the long blond slope
into the valley checker-boarded
with blue with green.
Stop at the silver silo.
Speak to the brown holy woman
wearing the one enchanted ruby.
The mountain green at my right :
The sunlight yellow at my left :
The laughing winds pass between,
The river white at my left :
The flowers red at my right :
The laughing girls go between.
The clouds sail away at my right ;
The birds flap down at my left :
The laughing moon appears between.
I turned left to the dale of poem ;
I turned right to the forest of Love :
But I hurry Home by the road between.
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
I CAME from the sunny valleys
And sought for the open sea,
For I thought in its gray expanses
My peace would come to me.
I came at last to the ocean
And found it wild and black,
And I cried to the windless valleys,
"Be kind and take me back!"
But the thirsty tide ran inland,
And the salt waves drank of me,
And I who was fresh as the rainfall
Am bitter as the sea.
Now the mountain top is won,
Behold the valley in the sun —
The gold and yellow farms that lie
Bare-bosomed to the courting sky;
The olive hills, the meadows green.
The towns that punctuate the scene;
The little spires that seem to cry
For leaves and blossoms to the sky.
So delicate, it seems the breeze
Must stir them like the willow trees.
Ah, happy vale, how sweet you are,
As I observe you from this car;
How pleasant here to sit and shirk
And know your dwellers are at work!