PARTISAN REVIEW
To the maidenhead lakes, perennials, thronged by a rout
Of moss-niche rillets
Giggling from snowhang and glacier, green brimful dwellers
But flowing out, flowing out
Of lakeself with cries of creekfall and quicksilver sluice
Sidling over the iron
Of bedrock. Tum where I would, the land spoke me of love
And disasters. Footloose
I came,
in
an ebb-slide country that crawled under toehold
And slagged over heelmark,
But slipshod by misstep, wrist-deep in the runnels of shale
And the windlift of mould,
I fell upon rockbottom ore, and my roots fixed in wedlock
With stone: until stone slide
In landgive, and iron be halved, and you, I, and all
Go
down to the bedrock.
