Letter from the Countryside

 
Quite in the middle of nowhere
I have sought to discover
The extent of my ignorance
And am doing admirably.
 
A light-starved hawthorn
Caught among pines puts out
A few plain flowers,
And I do not grab
 
As once I might have have at
The analogy but let
The pointless sweetness
Of the fact flood me.
 
The beauty of abandonment
Is no mean thing:
Goldenrod growing through
The frame of a rusted Chevy,
 
Listing barns, fields
(And fields are people’s lives)
Routed by poplar
Effacing whole generations.
 
It’s forlorn, the children
Grown up only to move away -
But who cares for
Packaged consolations?
 
Meaning stubbornly luxuriates,
The sturdy American
Weaknesses beckon:
Seeing is believing,
 
Remarking is thinking.
I too am a landscape.
Knowledge is a gesture
Which all things make.
 
                    - Baron Wormser