Above the Oxbow

Here in this valley of discrete academies

We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks

To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock,

Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest.

Still, they're out best mustering of height: by

Comparison with the sunnken silver-grizzled

Back of the Connecticut, the river-level

Flats of Hadley farms, they're lofty enough

Elevations to be called something more than hills.

Green, wholly green, they stand their knobby spine

Against our sky: they are what we look southward to

Up Pleasant Street at Main. Poising their shapes

Between the snuff and red tar-paper apartments,

They mound a summer coolness in our view.

To people who live in the bottom of valleys

A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks

To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic

In going up for the coming down if the post

We start at's the same post we finish by,

But it's the clear conversion at the top can hold

Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful

Wish for even ground, and it's the last cliff

Ledge will dislodge out cramped concept of space, unwall

Horizons beyond vision, spill vision

After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye

To full capacity. We climb to hopes

Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,

Blindered by green, under a green-grained sky

Into the blue. Tops define themselves as places

Where nothing higher's to be looked to. Downward looks

Follow the black arrow-backs of swifts on their track

Of the air eddies' loop and arc though air's at rest

To us, since we see no leaf edge stir high

Here on a mount overlaid with leaves. The paint-peeled

Hundred-year-old hotel sustains its ramshackle

Four-way veranda, view-keeping above

The fallen timbers of its once remarkable

Funicular railway, witness to gone

Time, and to graces gone with the time. A state view-

Keeper collects half-dollars for the slopes

Of state scenery, sells soda, shows off viewpoints.

A ruffy skylight oaints the gray oxbow

And paints the river's pale circumfluent stillness.

As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux

Of the desultory currents —- all that unique

Stripple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost

In the simplified orderings of sky-

Lorded perspectives. Maplike, the far fields are ruled

By correct green lines and no seedy free-for-all

Of asparagus heads. Cars run their suave

Colored beads on the strung roads, and the people stroll

Straightforwardly across the springing green.

All's peace and discipline down there. Till lately we

Lived under the shadow of hot rooftops

And never saw how coolly we might move. For once

A high hush quietens the crickets' cry.