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PARTISAN REVIEW
him, and when I began to write I realized, hey , wait a minute, these
two figures are the old poet, Warren, and his daughter on the bank.
And it changes into a kind of a friendly tribute to both of them. It is
for Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren's wife, who is also a fine
writer.
On the Indian Trail
They'd come to one of those creeks where the dragonfly dries
his gauze on dry rock; for a while out of reach
of musket, gunpowder horn, and some tacit arrow,
this young squaw and old settler by some new pines.
I have changed this into a mottled pioneer and his daughter,
so let Red and Rosanna Penn Warren have these lines .
In his eyes she saw such coming distances.
The blue that entered the eyes of Pizarro,
a face whose wrinkles might creak like saddle leather,
and greying hair that was thinning like cirrus ,
the rime on the edge of the always retreating sierras ,
the guano of hawks. Thin shins of old age
when he washes under his armpits in the brown water,
the sag of his eyes. But the eyes glint
like a kingfisher crossing upstream, and she imagined
the corona of gnats around his powerful skull
like the circular argument of cloistered friars
under the dome of Salamanca. His hand is transparent
and crisp as velium, the veined, yellowing page .
He came , carrying his things, and again, in the eyes:
a wisdom beyond that of any parent,
and what is the true beginning of beauty : age .
