~MIL NORMAN-RISCH~

DOWNINGSVILLE ROAD, VERMONT

---

Me alone, fields on each side,
walking wrong, somehow,
on a road at night.

Silence, except shoeshuffle on gravel;
I have to make things out by contrast as I go:
Fence, field, barn, gate. What’s whitest here is road.

A far off porchlamp layers light as waves,
The hayfield’s stalktips crest and angle,
Swelling, then dimming, into nowhere.

I pass a house, where the sight of sudden color
—yellow panes of light—makes me form these words:
“like sorrows laid out one by one in squares.”

I think of the trappers and farmers who walked this road
years ago, alone in a darkness, listening, waiting
not for sentences, but for foxes, for rain.

 
 

© by Mil Norman-Risch