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From "Selected Poems"
by Philip Levine
Milkweek
Remember how unimportant they seemed, growing loosely in the open fields we crossed on the way to school. We would carve wooden swords and slash at the luscious trunks until the white milk started and then flowed. Then we'd go on to the long day after day of the History of History or the tables of numbers and order as the clock slowly paid out the moments. The windows went dark first with rain and then snow, and then the days, then the years ran together and not one mattered more than another, and not one mattered.
Two days ago I walked the empty woods, bent over, crunching through oak leaves, asking myself questions without answers. From somewhere a froth of seeds drifted by touched with gold in the last light of a lost day, going with the wind as they always did. |