Gustav Grunewald (Moravian-American painter, 1805-78)
This broken stump in the shade dominates
The foreground to measure any view
Of the ideal origin, innocence and law
And reduce it to an impossibly round
Calypso seducing with pencil lines too blue,
Grass like a brush, nothing but solos,
Lonely rivers, mountains too steep for their slopes,
Exotic laurels and pines peaceful with crows,
The whitest of creeks and most inviting gaps,
Glossy mists and twenty-story waterfalls
Powering into my viscera the hope
They really exist, that I might want these things
With a straight seminary of dark windows,
Where women need companions and men to be alone;
A steeple transmitting dreams of room at the inn
And a god but not violets, local slate
And children's bones owning the burial ground;
The town when it also named the road
In the fields with no fence (though it's in a photo),
In winter from the north and summer from
The south, no other way; and conscience
Calm as a locked canal, two men fishing,
And a third about to capsize in a boat
Added like an afterthought yet equally remote
From the real experience I want to grub
Among these scenes: the sprouting kernel
Of this address when it looked like them;
My home on their "High Street", still highest
And now my street, even my baby says so.
Page(s) 8
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