1.

A wall of fire steals across the prairie 
and the string quartet in the downstairs parlor 
breaks off suddenly when a blizzard of light invades our sleep, 
our overlapping dreams which we dismiss knowingly, sweetly, 
as the mirror of our passing lives, the music on the other side 
of ourselves that never breaks off—or so we pray 
on such mornings as these, Sunday amid the alfalfa, two hills’ 
distance from the green river with its fertile banks, 
its hot mud of baptism and forgetting and slow birth. . . 
In these tall, too-white rooms the gold dust of wheat and maize 
hangs passively behind the sunlit curtains, and the conversation 
of the barefoot girls wafts up to us from the road, 
the easy bells of their voices that will ring in our ears 
long after they are gone and talked past their passionate and idle 
adventures of the night, the quicker passion of innocence, 
which for us has become so many murky dreams and quartets and 
preoccupations (like baggage) too hastily packed and too easily lost.