As I think of pine needles
My boyhood hangs on and destroys me;
My beard draws inward,
Into the roots of my face,
And cannot get out again,
And I grow hard and small
And secret, with the same
Doomed shock of lightheaded hair
That I had long years before
To climb between the pine trees.
I begin to rise through the valley
Through the hemmed night whiteness of fog
Up to the rows of cracked cages
My father built when my hair
Fell down on my vision as though
Someone had pitched hay on my head.
They are resting there
On their unmerciful feet
In the wet dark, their murderous brains
Shivering, and so white-hot they see,
Through the film of their eyelids, the sun
Race against time to be born,
The light come through the fog
Before it can burn.
My father’s life was spent
Binding onto their crabbed, scaly ankles
The bent iron heels of their pride
Before he lay down in the green
Of the river pasture and thrust
A stone straight up from his breast
To say his name. And now,
With my youth rising slowly and groping
From pine bole to bole like the blind,
A cock cries out for blood.
Lying under that cry, the dawn
Knows it must come to this place.
My hair like a mighty crown
Expands and becomes the mist
That burns away in the sun,
And I am a lean, bald man
Standing between the white coops
As all of them lift up their voices
To pull the sun over the pines,
To pull my fierce-eyed father
From the low river mist of his grave.
But the listening dead lie stillest
When nearest their moment of rising,
When their dazed, aging sons lift hands
To their own faces now like their fathers’,
Feeling beards as useless as pinestraw,
And the earthbound eagles close harder
Their untended feet on the roosts,
Drawing more power from earth
To raise the sun, but not
The dead, though almost those also,
Who yet may appear, some morning,
In my father’s house
Of cages, where all night his legions have held
The great, crooked, summoning cry
Building in their long throats
As they stared, burning the film
Of death from their auburn eyes,
With lost, inconceivable challenge
Into the coming sun.
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