The boy having fshed alone
down Empfeld Run fom where it started on stony ground,
in oak and chestnut tinber,
then crossed the Nicktown Road into a stand
of bare-trunked beeches ghostÌy white in the noon twilight—
having reached a place of sunlipht
that used to be hemlock woods on the slope of a broad valley,
the woods cut twenty years ago for tanbark
and then burned over, so the great charred trunks
lay crisscross, wreathed in briars, gray in the sunlipht,
black in the shadow of saplings hardly grown
to fishing-pole size: black birch and yellow birch,
black cherry and fire cherry—
having caupht four little trout that foat, white bellies up,
in a lard bucket half-full of lukewarm water—
having unwrapped a sweat-damp cloth from a slab of pone
to eat with dewberries picked fom the heavy vines—
now sprawls above the brook on a hiph stone,
his bare scratched knees in the sun, his fishing pole beside him,
not sleeping but dozing awake like a snake on the stone.
Waterskaters dance on the pool beneath the stone.
A bullftog goes silently back to his post among the weeds.
A dragonfly hovers and darts above the water.
The boy does not look down at them
or up at the hawk now standing still in the pale-blue mountain
sky,
and yet he feels them, insect, hawk, and sky,
much as he feels warm sandstone under his back,
or smells the punk-dry hemlock wood,
or hears the secret voice of water trickling under stone.
The land absorbs him into itself,
as he absorbs the land, the ravaged woods, the pale sky;
not to be seen, but as a way of seeing;
not to be judged, but as a law of judgment;
not even to remember, but stamped in the bone.
“Mine,” screams the hawk, “Mine,” hums the dragonfy,
and “Mine,” the boy whispers to the empty land
that folds him in, half-animal, halfprown,
still as the sunlight, stilÏ as a hawk ín the sky,
still and relaxed and watchful as a trout under the stone.
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