The sound of double-stopping, violin
Notes paired and running hand in hand
Through the hot noon sunlight, wanders over
The oatfield, high and yet unmown.
Smelling oat straw and bony, weathered wood
By the ruined barn I lie, and
Hear insistent bowings, drones, twangs, beyond
The occasional cicada,
The bird inquiring in some distant grove:
Unshaded even by the beam
Hanging amid the cloudless blue over
My head, I peer over the fields,
Over the faroff line of trees, over
The blue above them, at the high,
Gathering cumulus, summing August
Childhood, waiting for later days.
The clouds collect soundlessly. The wind at
That altitude, wailing among
White peaks, seems muffled in their melting depths.
But I will hear it later on,
Behind the underlining vapor trail
That neither connects nor divides
The rose part of the sky and the cold, blue
Region of yet-unrisen night,
But that follows a final flight eastward;
Behind prestidigitations
Of the crippled fiddler at a spotlit
Music festival out of doors:
The impatient panting of the high winds
Buffeting inaccessible
Mountains of cloud whose distance from me shrinks
Now, even as they are dissolved.
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