River Road

(photo by W. Eugene Smith)

by Stanley Kunitz

That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,

I slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth,

fighting my sleep,

and one night saw a Hessian soldier

stand at attention there in full

regalia, till his head broke into flames.

My only other callers were the FBI

sent to investigate me as a Russian spy

by patriotic neighbors on the river road;

and flying squirrels parachuting from the elms

who squeaked in rodent heat between the walls

and upstairs rumbled at their nutty games.

I never dared open the attic door.

Even my nervous Leghorns joined the act,

indulging their taste for chicken from behind.

A glazed look swam into the survivors’ eyes;

they caught a sort of dancing-sickness,

a variation of the blind staggers,

that hunched their narrow backs and struck

a stiffened wing akimbo,

as round and round the poultry yard

they flapped and dropped and flapped again.

The county agent shook his head:

not one of them was spared the cyanide.

That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,

I paced up and down the bottom-fields,

tamping the mud-puddled nurslings in

with a sharp blow of the heel

timed to the chop-chop of the hoe:

red pine and white, larch, balsam fir,

one stride apart, two hundred to the row,

until I heard from Rossiter’s woods

the downward spiral of a veery’s song

unwinding on the eve of war.

Lord! Lord! who has lived so long?

Count it ten thousand trees ago,

five houses and ten thousand trees,

since the swallows exploded from Bowman Tower

over the place where the hermit sang,

while I held a fantail of squirming roots

that kissed the palm of my dirty hand,

as if in reply to a bird.

The stranger who hammers No Trespass signs

to the staghorn sumac along the road

must think he owns this property.

I park my car below the curve

and climbing over the tumbled stones

where the wild foxgrape perseveres,

I walk into the woods I made,

my dark and resinous, blistered land,

through the deep litter of the years.


From: Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995)"River Road" was originally published in 1966.