THE LAST CRICKET OF THE SEASON
after Elizabeth Bishop
When I catch a cricket’s high
autumnal pitch sprung from
among a row of ragged junipers,
my heart seeks out the levelest
and most insistent, homeward
foot and yard to my front door.
On Missouri’s warmest days,
these many free and careless
years, I have often paused for
shade under a great oak tree
to observe pairs of doves that
quietly group under this same
line of evergreens. My children
have grown and spread, my
sweetheart is at home stirring
alone a late martini, and cars
roar to the westward freeway
bound for glory and California:
I grow invisible or gray which
is just the same difference as
they say. But this cricket’s call
rocks my world—Jimi Hendrix,
Rolling Stones. Though cold
and colder this evening’s air, I
can still pitch high, and I can
swing homeward, as if immortal.
EVENING ON A BACK ROAD
Scattered sheets of cloud and a late burst of sunlight
tangle with tree limb and oak leaf between the seaside
and Camolin. I drive blinded again on the back road
by an old sun falling away to the Blackstairs’ mast.
For all these years along this route, I have called out
to a fat church spire at the end of a line of yew trees
that never could despoil the ripened shamelessness
of fields bedded on layers of wet marl. Beasts heave
and breathe, the road bends over the humped bridge.
This road is within me, so blindly drifting: it is itself
& the wind’s lone gray substitute, as full of movement
as the railway’s sleepers are dipped in creosote and
fixed to a narrow gauge. Cows swing from the church
bell’s rope. Sugar beets bolt from the ground. As the
strawberry absorbs the dew, the widower discounts
the news. The priest’s housekeeper has turned-up his
stereo to twenty-five. Meeting the River Bann at the
main road, I pick from neon each yellow of the village:
A petrol station, Wexford flags, and the Parkside Bar.
So then! The road straightens. The car picks up speed.
Copyright © Eamonn Wall 2012
