The literate are ill-prepared for this <br />snap in the line of life: <br />the day turns a trick <br />of twisted tongues and is <br />untiable, the month by no mere root <br />moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more <br />than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn <br /> <br />the buried meaning in the grave: here <br />all we see of its alphabet is tracks <br />of predators, all we know of its tense <br />the slow seconds and quick centuries <br />of sex. Unletter the past and then <br />the future comes to terms. One late fall day <br />I stumbled from the study and I found <br />the easy symbols of the living room revised: <br /> <br />my shocked senses flocked to the window's reference <br />where now all backyard attitudes were deep <br />in memory: the landscapes I had known too well- <br />the picnic table and the hoe, the tricycle, the stubborn <br />shrub-the homegrown syllables <br />of shapely living-all <br /> <br />lay sanded and camelled by foreign snow...<br /><br />Heather McHugh<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/stroke/
