It is late at night, cold and damp <br />The air is filled with tobacco smoke. <br />My brain is worried and tired. <br />I pick up the encyclopedia, <br />The volume GIC to HAR, <br />It seems I have read everything in it, <br />So many other nights like this. <br />I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak, <br />Listening to the long rattle and pound <br />Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance. <br />Suddenly I remember <br />Coming home from swimming <br />In Ten Mile Creek, <br />Over the long moraine in the early summer evening, <br />My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud. <br />I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse, <br />And instantly and clearly the revelation <br />Of a song of incredible purity and joy, <br />My first rose-breasted grosbeak, <br />Facing the low sun, his body <br />Suffused with light. <br />I was motionless and cold in the hot evening <br />Until he flew away, and I went on knowing <br />In my twelfth year one of the great things <br />Of my life had happened. <br />Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek. <br />On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive. <br />And I am on the other side of the continent <br />Ten years in an unfriendly city.<br /><br />Kenneth Rexroth<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/gic-to-har/
