I am halfway between the canebrake and the pines.

The horizon stretches like a bow-string, sun

deep citron over the pasture. Language whines

and lisps toward meaning, trying to get one

blessèd thing right—O wonders turned to signs:

trees shine with mold out where the creekbeds run,

wet Fields brim with midges, and white curds

of foam wash up at the pond's edge in these words.

Like spells to conjure with, this verb, this noun—

three red-winged blackbirds at the pasture's edge

gleaning the grass seed have already flown

and disappeared somewhere beyond the hedge,

only to be recalled in this phrase, set down

as a part of speech. So language keeps its pledge.

I find the loss in what these words redeem,

like the sleeper who awakes to another dream.

I have come back in the middle of a sentence

in middle life: here my grandfather tended

corn and plowed the back Fields, stripped the dense

kudzu before it choked the soybeans. Winded,

he'd walk along the full length of the fence

to drink cold water where the creekbed ended.

I imagine seeing him climb the distant hill.

Language sings its one song, hold still, hold still.

What I have to say turns the pasture to fiction.

Parsing the back Fields, grammar and syntax fail.

Even the blackbirds are reduced to diction,

sculling through air as they do above the swale.

A world combusts to nothing in the friction

between a phrase and its referent: or the tale

persists as cadence, though the names of things

are frail as spent breath or the midges’ wings.

Whom or what are these words for? Not the dead

who cannot hear them anyway. Not the wet

soybean Fields or canebrake or the redwinged

blackbirds slurring the air. What slips the net

of language has no use for what is said

about it. Even I will soon forget.

Each word quarrels with silence at the close:

where speech comes from, and where everything goes.