There Is No Exile Where The Heart Is Pure
( for Pablo Casals )
Behind the barn, the first week of March, on a bright
morning after long rain,
the windy cedar tree
turns round and round in the sunlight.
A winter horse
rubs himself on the corner of the barn.
Little pieces of cedar glide down where the ants are
calling home their old senators who
have failed utterly.
Coming home, carrying suitcases full of noise,
they pass through small American towns.
On the barn wall,
rusted nails bleed; and in fences, in hinges, in boards.
The horse (I think of Casals in exile!) plays
a suite unaccompanied in the silver cedar boards.
Inside,
the stranded hay-wagon shudders.
Between its floorboards
seeds
trickle to the earth.
A dry dusty odor mingles with festering dampness,
and a hand —
blue ridges and rivers coming and going through it —
rests on the white sheet of the windows.
My grandmother
comes to swing open wide the huge
double doors,
doors like drifting continents,
and a wedge of healing sunlight
slips into the barn before her.
_____________________________
Robert Sund
The Hides of White Horses Shedding Rain
Copper Canyon Press, 1981
there never were enough Robert Sund poems —
it's strange, each time I type out Robert Sund's
name it shows up as Robert Sung — as if he is
returning (as I type) or has indeed returned —
to the Sung Dynasty, where of course he belongs.
This book, signed by Sund, I have no idea where
it came from — maybe a good friend, a lucky find?
here in New England — far from the Sund home of
Washington State — where as I boy in the late 60s I
had already found his masterpiece Bunch Grass
and crowded the book into my work lunchpail as
a great companion with me at midday. "Whatcha
got there, Bob, the book. . .what's bunch grass?"
I'm finding out. . .
[ BA ]
