A Pastoral

At that time the sheep called to him From their wormy bellies, as they Lay bloating in the field. He was A pastoralist, The schoolhouse hardly handsize In a sky of flax. He began Then to keep the sayings of man (The left hand writing; the right hand Crossing out) farming the time by day With a great rake And in the evening hearing myths Of the hurricane and the tornado (Straws driven through glass), And of the waking in the grave (The sharp hands of brothers buried Together). In the deep night the rat- Traps in the seed room broke the rat's Back, and the rat called to him in The next room over in a penetrating Eloquent way. In the parlor it was Always deep night where the separated Organs of the living slept in jars (The lank goiter and the rotted Appendix) awaiting the end-time When the emasculated ram will rise In the flax-blue sky (Cold as the final bluing of a Sunday wash) And all of us will know The use in beauty of the whole body. In the hay field was the beginning Of knowledge: Sour wine, the great rake hoisted Toward the high sun-altar of the stack And the hoist rope hauled out hard (Like a greased whip of which the stories Told were of the severing of limbs) By two staggering teams—and the whole Sun in its extreme tower of noon. All he heard was violent and sad But he kept on writing the sayings Of man with his left hand, and sent Them off in broken words, and waited In the mortal field Listening to the mice in the bottom Of the stack. Now though the schoolhouse Hangs like a stone over the field Robed in its winding sheet as blue as air, The shepherd hand of eloquence still keeps And flashes Out the sayings of the man— And the other (the right hand of Obliterating habit) sleeps.