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two heads, one bald and one gray, above.

      I believe they are serious motionless men,

      facing a wall with a small window.

      One could be my great-grandfather,

      dead for seventy years, and the other

      could be his father who voted both times

      for Lincoln. A window, a single pane

      inside a hinged frame, is swung

      open in a high-up corner

      of the wall, and a plank of level light

      is reaching through the square. The room

      is a sizable room, and I have entered

      from another room — perhaps I’m still

      a figure standing in the doorway.

      I don’t remember everything,

      but I am breathing there and the room

      is warm from an old iron stove

      whose pipe runs crookedly

      through another wall. In front of the men

      is a table, maybe made from a crate.

      That is where, I remember now, I left

      the book I had been reading, and now

      I see it — Progress? — the one-word

      question running down its spine.

      The men are staring at the book,

      and I suppose they’ve wondered, too,

      because they made the room and the window;

      in the hill behind the house they dug

      the root cellar and lined it with stone.

      The window is high to catch the light

      as soon as the sun comes over the hill,

      and the house is there because of the hill.

      Beside the house is a bottom patch —

      my father plowed it with a mule.

      And by these signs is how I know

      I’ve been asleep. I’ve been to the room

      with two old men inside, and a stove,

      and a book; and a light, before it tilts

      to flood the room, is still a stream

      trickling through the window,

      and the window, God knows why, is swung

      into the room like an open gate.

      The room of the time before my time

      was hewed and hammered together from sleep;

      but a glimpse of some other time was left.

      I saw it from the doorway where

      I stood as solemn as a tree,

      as if I were growing in the dream.

THE MAN IN THE COUNTRY OF HIS DREAM

      I’m going around in the green shade,

      now, making shapes in the air —

      see that, now that’s a house up there,

      and there’s the little chimney — ’weep,

      ’weep, remember William Blake?

      Bless his dream! God bless

      chimneys, too — and here’s a goat

      named Mattie, and there’s a pair

      of dominicker hens, the one

      on the left is Lulu and on

      the right is Aunt Mabel, though

      I call them the Girls — hey, speaking of

      there’s one in the doorway now — she’s

      the lady here and looky there

      at them long legs! — it’s okay,

      we can use bad grammar, we’re

      in love — and see that little peek-

      aboo tugging the lady’s skirt?

      cute as a bug that one — bless

      them all forever, bless their hearts —

      and don’t forget the dogs, all four —

      now over there’s the pawpaw patch,

      but I didn’t make it up, it’s real,

      and so’s the wahoo tree down yonder.

MODERNITY

      In the old days people got

      old, and age diminished them

      or not depending on how one thought

      of age. Is age a number that

      declines with mere increase, against

      the grain of simple arithmetic,

      in denial of the facts of the force

      that brings the rings around the hearts

      of trees wider and wider out?

      Or is age a complicated way

      to give time a true description,

      and from that attitude to feel

      a thought like an old fish in a pool

      swim up, or rise like bubbles floating

      from a turtle sinking to the bottom

      of a pond? A long time ago

      I knew a man named Jonah Payne

      who, when the rural electric came,

      had said he was too old to get it.

      Yet he lived another forty years

      or so, beyond the advent of

      the age when light could be called forth

      with a switch. He switched his fields around —

      but that procedure took more time

      and thought. By eminent domain

      the towers and long transmission lines

      divided the sky from the ground beneath it.

      It was a mistake, said Mr. Payne,

      to hitch up time that way, to take

      away its weight and leave an instant.

      These observations came to him

      at night, when by the stars and moon

      he rose to a ridge above the world

      and the lights splayed below were few

      and innocent enough to look back

      at him like a creature whose eyes have for

      a moment caught the light of the moon.

      But even Jonah Payne, you see,

      came to me in a dream, a light

      in his own right reflected from

      a moon that made its arc across

      the sky of sleep — he was a man

      whose age was older than his time,

      and that is how it used to be.

      But now it is another time,

      a shorter one, without

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