Here in a circle of maples I can sit
Half of a day in the sun, and before and after
Figure the speed of shadows; eastward, westward,
Going or coming, all of the shade is one.
Night, the centerless circle, widening, leaves
Me and the bounded brightness, whence I watch
Birds, coming and going--westward, eastward--
Clouds, and the smallest of all my circles, the sun.
Beyond this rounded silence there is nothing.
Roads go to the tops of hills and over,
Over to Canaan and over to all of the Cornwalls:
Eastward, westward, on to the two grey oceans.
For me they end on the hills.
And now there rises
Thunder of cars that pass below on the pike.
They pass, are gone; and still the Hollow is sounding.
Round and round it runs, the prisoned thunder,
Higher and higher yet in the curving trees.
I listen and follow, and laugh as the feet grow tired,
Falter, and stumble, and enter the death of hills.
Beyond there is crying of trains that people have taken,
Pointing them straight to the west. I do not listen.
Rim of the world, that cry is yours to devour.
Here am I nourished enough; remembering only
Men long gone who, never considering circles,
Straightened their eyes and pointed their steps to the West.
Through a cool
And speckled wood,
Where unseen
An Indian stood
And asked the meaning
Of their eyes,
They followed hot
Upon the cries
Of men ahead,
Whose going warmed
Paths no feet
Had ever formed;
Until there ran
A stiffened road
To where the first
River flowed.
Silver it came,
Lazily, widely, down from the North;
And one on a raft put forth
And gave it a name.
Word blew back,
Flushing the faces of men in file;
And, trotting the ultimate mile
Of the shadowy track,
Ten of them shouted,
Bringing the ferry again to the shore.
They crossed; and again there were more.
And some of them doubted;
Two of them turned,
Talking together of East and home.
But there was the river in foam,
And both of them burned
New now with desire;
Looking across where the water was walled
Once more with a wood, that called
Their feet to the fire
Laid far in the West:
Waiting for these who would touch it to flame.
So on, and ever the same,
And never a rest.
So over the biggest of rivers
And on to the plains,
Under a sun whose shadows
Were yellowing stains
On the green of the grass, and the white
Of the desert beyond.
At evening it reddened the world.
And the goers were fond
Of saying that this was the fire,
That this was the end;
Only a hundred mountains
Now to ascend,
Only a hundred valleys
And there it would wait:
Faggot and leaf and log
On an altar of fate.
The feet and the eyes drew on
Till the ocean was there.
Then silence. The hills were asleep,
And the beaches were bare,
And the sun going down in the sea
Went utterly out.
And the travellers looked at each other
And turned about.
Here in the circle of maples where I am standing
Only the bodies come back of these long gone.
Thinly they walk in the shade, and thinly endeavor,
Turning, to keep to the West. But they have lost it;
And so all afternoon I will see them circling--
Birds with a wounded wing--and never at rest.
The thoughts of a traveller never can curve and return.
Only the body comes back of one long gone
Straightly and far away. And bodies discover
Death in the hills, and death in a circle of sound.
-- Mark Van Doren (Now the Sky and Other Poems, 1928)
