278
PARTISAN REVIEW
our voices returning from the hills to meet us.
We need the landscape to repeat us.
Here where you were born
we watched the sundown swallow
dive, drive and turn,
we skimme:d stones or might follow
the ,killdeer from her nest;
we walked where, in their day of rest
lovers lay always on the riverbanks. You still
live nearby, on fhe opposite hill.
After; the windstorm
of July Fourth, all summer
through the light, warm
haze we heard great chain saws chirr
like iron locusts, watched crews
of squirrelmen climbing to hack loose
limbs twisted, torn in the shattering wind, cut free
the wrenched branches that could sap the tree.
By the park's birdrun
we once found, loose, outside,
a buff pigeon,
proud, brown-spatted. When I tried
to take her, she flappe.d so
fiercely in my grip,
]
let her go.
The kee,per came and we helped snarl her ina net.
You bring things
]'
d as leave forget.
] mind how the red-
winged blackbird fla pped her wild wings,
dived at my head,
scolding how her frail nest swings
there, where the tall reeds sway.
] recollect here your first May--
rain and the river rising, the killdeers flying
all night over the mudflat's crying.
I showed this poem, for criticism, to a number of my friends at
the University of Iowa. Most of them liked it
in
a lukewarmish way;
