The trees went up the hill <br />And over it. <br />Then the dry grasses of the pasture were <br />Only a kind of blonde light <br />Settling everywhere <br />And framing the randomly strewn <br />Outcropping of gray stone <br /> <br />That anchored them to soil. <br /> <br />Who were they? <br />One in the picture, & one not, & both <br />Scotch-Irish drifters, <br />With nothing in common but a perfect contempt <br />for a past; <br />Ancestors of stumps & fallen trees & . . . . <br />One sits on a sorrel mare, <br />Idly tossing small stones at the rump <br />of a steer <br />That goes on grazing at tough rosettes <br />of pasture grass & switching its tail <br />In what is not yet irritation. <br /> <br />What I like, what I <br /> <br />Have always liked, is the way he tosses each small <br />Stone without thinking, without <br />A thought for anything, not aiming at all, <br />The easy, arcing forearm nonchalance <br />Like someone fly casting, <br />For this is what <br />He wanted: <br />To be among the stones, the grasses, <br />Savoring a stony self <br />That reminded him of no one else, <br />And on land where that poacher, Law, <br />Had not yet stolen through his fences, <br />The horse beneath him tensing <br />Its withers lightly to keep <br /> <br />The summer flies away, <br /> <br />And the woman in the flower-print dress hemmed <br />With stains <br />A half mile off <br />Is the authoress of no more than smoke rising, <br />Her sole diary & only publication, <br />From a distant chimney. <br />They have perhaps a year or two <br />Left of this <br />Before history begins to edit them into <br />Something without smoke or flies, something <br />Beyond all recognition.<br /><br />Larry Levis<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-clearing-of-the-land-an-epitaph/
