You needn't be a spectre in the Underworld.
ry
ou don't believe in it, do you? Nor do I)
But I'm hoping you'll be willing to make a trade:
If you'd just show me how to shoot one bull's eye
And introduce that friend of yours, the air,
I'll bring you to an open tract of sky
And wildness you can't have dreamed was here
In this, your own, our own, unlikely country.
Surely reports came through that you would hear,
Lavinia would read them out loud in the pantry
While you were making puddings or baking bread,
The view outside the window placid, wintry;
You'd look dreamy-eyed but shake your head.
Such preposterous tales of breadth and width and height.
But they were true. I'll show you.
I'll
be guide -
We'll reverse Dante and Virgil- while
you
write.
You see, I'm not quite up to what I've seen.
I should have stayed at home, always worn white,
But there was so much out there, Emily, and I like green.
Besides I want to know what you'd have made -
If a garden snake is
Zero at the Bone -
Of hordes of spires of rock, all scalded red,
The wicked turned by spirits into stone
Or so the local people have always said.
If only they'd turned all Amherst into stone
And the tone-deaf editors who changed your rhymes.
You wouldn't have had to stay up there alone
And might have known how landscape climbs and climbs
Until you have no vantage point, no explanation
Except what you can summon from the Psalms.
And the land in maps that press their way to ocean
Turns out to be covered in endless sage
That goes silver at the slightest provocation.
