I
I made no sound at all like the wintering
Of the paper wasp, or milch cattle
In fog,
Or the mud-caked winesaps in the cellar.
I just watched the neighbor
Up in the ladder with his torch.
The wooly nests of the tent-caterpillars
Swelled as he sent them off with fire.
All that morning he poured Clorox
Down the anthill under the linden.
I read about children gone mad
With the shelling in Jerusalem.
It was two nights before
Charles Cobb stood outside his barn
And saw beyond the potatoes
A triangle of blue lights
Revolve above his firepond. The newspaper
Said it was other beings, and it spoke
Of war in the Holy Land. That night
The neighbor climbed into the elm again
With a torch. An hour passed,
Then he grabbed at his heart! He was there
Until morning in the big gnarled
Crotch of the tree. I slept in the window
Seeing in my dream the neighbor
Twenty years earlier, in a January thaw,
The flashpoint of his rifle in the pines,
Deer running out onto the pond, the ice
Breaking under them, just antlers
Thrashing above water like the dark bare
Branches of sumac that are there now.
A span of mules
Dragged the frozen deer up the winter road.
II
Out of my mother’s sleep I heard those light
Watery ovations in the spring onions.
I woke to watch the black ant
Milk the happy aphid right on the rose.
I listened to the hoarse chack-chack
Of the partridge working like the adze blade
In the woods. At dusk I looked up
At the hill, the caterpillars were spewing
Their gauze boxes again in the elm.
The neighbor’s son was out to get them.
A whole year
The ladder had just lain there on the ground.
The neighbor’s boy walked it up
Into the tree, dipped his torch of rags
Into gasoline and lit them. On the night breeze
A sleeve of fire drifted down behind him
And splattered on the lawn where the weight
Of the ladder’s drowse had left its image
As dead grass which began to burn
Missing, like the ladder itself,
A high rung.
I watched. And made no sound …
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