Читать книгу Love's Last Number - Christopher Howell - Страница 16

KANSAS

A man is standing in a field

at the edge of a town so small

it sometimes forgets itself and goes home

to its pale, lopsided houses and dry, leaf-filled

fishponds in the weedy corners

of its yards. If it’s almost dark

someone might suppose

he has come to lift his arms and ask

for a life that would remember him

or for a vision of horses wading toward the moon

just rising to signal that all’s well. But

as to that, who knows; so far

it might as well mean his mother

is calling her old dog in

from the barn, the barn that burned

and the dog that has been dead for fifty years.

He might as well be anyone come to that edge

that says things end

at the beginning of something else, that even wind

fingering the grass

knows this, teasing his mother’s mad white hair

in another life, where the fields continue to begin,

where the path that brought him ends and doesn’t care

how large or far or bright the rising moon, or if the dog

comes a last time when she calls.