session in the "sand hills"
TRANSCRIPT
University of Northern Iowa
Session in the "Sand Hills"Author(s): James ApplewhiteSource: The North American Review, Vol. 261, No. 4 (Winter, 1976), p. 49Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25117840 .
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8 Poems
JAMES APPLEWHITE
SESSION IN THE SAND HILLS
i
Trips east, I navigate into distances like being lost, and wander as if someone out of life.
Land falls away in sandy flanks, with orchards
and new furrowing, to sky like light for an infant.
Collecting dirt road glimpses, I am freed to see:
fields turning strange, as if looked at by eyes of other lives. China ball trees, prodigal with useless fruit.
Yards of winter weeds gone a gray beyond humility.
The finger of physical being, when it touches here and there, makes board walls tremble. Two wrestle on a
wadding
and pull down a spirit. Stunned by these surroundings, it forgets,
thinks ants traveling skin-smoothed bark are its limit.
II
We played in a backyard sand. My cousin's skin indented
and was biscuit plump. Folded by the moss-fenced lane, I held to her a vein swollen tight with my heart.
She uncovered in answer her white slit-pout.
When placed by my wife's limbs again, in a language of hours, I'll be more contented. No hourglass drained
our sand-piled world down a funnel. A board fence higher than
the wind held her by a fish pond in a photograph of sun.
Particles of my sight are
shining, black scrawls with grains
still travel, where two roots seem a crux between thighs.
Born into loneliness, I am vibrating in time, puzzling at
ciphers, above egg, black ant, love and the lottery.
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW/WINTER 7976 49
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