The Northern Turnpike winds
slowly over the fanks of Chestnut Ridge,
constricting slowly and like a snake the gauntness
of mountain barns.
It is brown, grey, the colors of a snake
turned on its back to die,
and yet was living once: stage-coaches wore
these ruts where brown weeds grow, the Stage Express
three times a week for Pittsburgh and the West,
three tưnes a week for Phiadelphia. Listen
… the creak of harness on the eastern slope,
horses break to a gallop, the hubs graze
fashionable buckboards or boat-shaped wagons,
a shower of fne pebbles forever drones
against the dashboard.
The sound dies away in chestnut trees.
At moments like this moment time becomes
something barely perceptible, a point
centuries into the future, into a past
without memory, a dead unchanging moment.
Cows moo beside the spring, crows gather where
in the south field a plowman drives his furrow.
Before he drives another there will be
new wars, new peoples multiplying vainly
before the sun drops down, before the purple
deepens and fades on the chestnuts of the Ridge.
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