Suppose it were Friday cxliii: If you do not come this day

               Morning and the snow might fall forever.
               I keep busy. I watch the yellow dogs
               chase creeping cars filled with Indians
               on their way to the tribal office.
               Grateful trees tickle the busy underside
               of our snow-fat sky. My mind is right,
               I think, and you will come today
               for sure, this day when the snow falls.

               From my window, I see bundled Doris Horseman,
               black in the blowing snow, her raving son,
               Horace, too busy counting flakes to hide his face.
               He doesn't know. He kicks my dog        
               and glares at me, too dumb to thank the men
               who keep him on relief and his mama drunk.

               My radio reminds me that Hawaii calls

               every afternoon at two. Moose Jaw is overcast,

               twelve below and blowing. Some people . . .

               Listen: if you do not come this day, today

               of all days, there is another time

               when breeze is tropic and riffs the green sap

               forever up these crooked cottonwoods. Sometimes,

               you know, the snow never falls forever.

We marvel now, to be shacked up

with a Party devoted to humili-

ation as the destiny of human-

ity - or, at least that portion

under its grasping governance:

marginalized as vulgar, in-

effectual, superstitious, cap-

tious, and cruel in the eyes

of the world, and subordinate

to exploitive layers of incor-

porated priests, mediating be-

tween ourselves and authority.

They set their face against

time, and anything that endures.

It is remarkable, David Ferry

wrote in his preface to Virgil's

Georgics, how the triumphs and

sufferings of the creatures other

than man are fully meaningful 

and substantiated in themselves;

they're never merely background

for, not merely metaphors for, 

the story of men. The dignity of

what they are is never exploited

as pathetic fallacy; there is no

condescension toward those others

who share our fallen world with us.

In the Classics we situate our

endeavors in a context of vastly

less illusion than our Parties

condition us to crave, but this

conduit is not content, it is

method: the eyesight of poetry.

This is why, after any reflection

in the world of Virgil, one turns

seamlessly effortlessly to the

poetry of the American, James Welch.

In this wonderful week, when an Am-

erican President stripped protec-

tions of preservation from a great

natural monument, and hurled the

ancient peoples of Palestine into

a vastly more volatile conflict

than international accords have

ever condoned, it is apposite to

see the trees, the dogs, the snow

invoked, not as background for re-

volting violations of promises. As 

very real sharers of our condition.

James Welch

Riding the Earthboy 40

  Going to Remake This World

op. cit.

Penguin, 2004©

i  Edward Dimsdale

   1999