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turning wheel. I’ve gone

      back there to lonely silence, but once

      I went and had the lonelier sense

      that just before there had been singing.

PASSION

      All of the sumac is scarlet now

      and the thistle heads have gone to silk

      and around the field the goldenrod

      nods in the rain, and anything

      with leaves or height is lowered. Heads

      must bend and bow, I almost say,

      but then I have the thought that rain —

      rain, rain, rain — is the voice,

      the very voice of repetition,

      each splash descended from the last

      in form and falling rhythm, each drop

      a long, wet verse before it hits.

      Rain was my season when I was a boy,

      and rain in fall was best. I’d walk

      across the field and find the woods

      where I’d lean against a cedar tree

      and listen to the steady rain.

      I liked the constant sound and motion,

      how that sound and motion eventually

      became the same blurred expression.

      But then I’d hear a second rain,

      a rain of solitary drops

      that fell from the branches with less precision,

      yet had an independent order,

      a rain that couldn’t help itself

      from being strange or stirring me

      to believe the first rain — steady

      and unified — is necessary

      for the second, the other, singular rain.

      An accidental counterpart

      to unity, a blind pursuit,

      like all desire, for the one design —

      to fall not fully from the sky

      and chase the chance to fall again?

      I mean falling for the darker sake

      of falling one way only once

      and maybe never noticed or known.

      What cannot be repeated, what

      will not be uniform, what breaks

      away defiantly from control —

      I’ve been a student of this art.

      It is one of God’s better tricks

      to make monotony revealing,

      but disruption is a subtle craft.

      Rain makes itself and makes,

      through more and more, the field believe

      this is eternity for now.

      But more and more of anything

      becomes too constant and proves too true

      and, so, the eternal must change.

      Eventually the rain will stop

      and the goldenrod and thistle heads

      will straighten, and that will be the world,

      or it will seem the world. But I wonder,

      I wonder if these prolific weeds

      will know they have again and again

      been swayed by the God who begins above

      in solitude by pouring out

      a bucket, an ordinary bucket?

THE GLASS EYE

      Freddie Terry would take it out

      and blow on it like an ember to fog

      it over, and then he’d polish it

      slowly on his shirttail

      before setting it back in the little cave

      above his cheek where it peered out

      shinier now and bluer than

      the good one, and when it caught the light

      it flickered as if it were coming to life.

      He lived with two or three brothers

      in a railroad rooming house.

      I’ve seen them dancing on the porch,

      unbelievable as ghosts —

      barefoot in overalls,

      and one of them would plink and pluck

      a banjo, forgoing melody

      for the more mysterious sense of sound.

      That house is years away in time —

      it was said the brothers shared a wife.

      By the end, though, they lived in public housing

      without a porch and kept indoors.

      Now all of them are gone from the earth.

      There was no skill in the work we did,

      the work, at least, didn’t ask it —

      clattering down through the warehouse

      with iron-wheeled ancient carts

      to drag them loaded back to the dock

      where the only twentieth-century fact —

      a straight-box truck — waited

      for loading. We’d do it again and again

      until all seven trucks were gone

      to the country stores which now themselves

      are gone: Bottoms’s, Pottsville, Jennings’s,

      Craintown, Redtop,

      even the little towns have gone.

      But some of the men gave skill to the work,

      simply by enjoying it,

      the rhythm and repetition, and then

      they’d interrupt it. Freddie would take

      it out around midday and squint

      with his good one through the glass and say,

      let’s see if I see dinnertime,

      and then in the afternoon he’d fish

      it out again and say, I believe

      I see it, five o’clock! — holding

      the eye before him like a lantern,

      as though he were leading us from darkness.

CHAPEL ON THE WAY TO HOBO TOWN

      One summer Belcher’s machine shop

      over by the railroad tracks

      blew up and burned to the ground.

      It was a long, low, shambling place

      and round — it looked like a feed trough

      turned upside down with a square front

      and the name over a sliding door

      with corrugated

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