Randall Jarrell

When you look down from the airplane you see lines,
Roads, ruts, braided into a net or web–
Where people go, what people do: the ways of life.

Heaven says to the farmer: “What’s your field?”
And he answers: “Farming,” with a field,
Or: “Dairy-farming,” with a herd of cows.
They seem a boy’s toy cows, seen from this high.

Seen from this high,
The fields have a terrible monotony.

But between the lighter patches there are dark ones.
A farmer is separated from a farmer
By what farmers have in common: forests,
Those dark things–what the fields were to begin with.
At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens.
At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.

If he could he’d make farm out of all the forest,
But it isn’t worth it: some of it’s marsh, some rocks,
There are things there you couldn’t get rid of
With a bulldozer, even–not with dynamite.
Besides, he likes it. He had a cave there, as a boy;
He hunts there now. It’s a waste of land,
But it would be a waste of time. A waste of money,
To make it into anything but what it is.

At night, from the airplane, all you see is lights,
A few lights, the lights of houses, headlights
And darkness. Somewhere below, beside a light,
The farmer, naked, takes out his false teeth:
He doesn’t eat now. Takes off his spectacles:
He doesn’t see now. Shuts his eyes.
If he were able to he’d shut his ears,
And as it is, he doesn’t hear with them.
Plainly, he’s taken out his tongue: he doesn’t talk.
His arms and legs: at least, he doesn’t move them.
They are knotted together, curled up, like a child’s.
And after he has taken off the thoughts
It has taken him his life to learn,
He takes off, last of all, the world.
When you take off everything what’s left? A wish,
A blind wish; and yet the wish isn’t blind,
What the wish wants to see, it sees.

There in the middle of the forest is the cave
And there, curled up inside it, is the fox.

He stands looking at it.
Around him the fields are sleeping: the fields dream.
At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.
At night the fields dream, the fields are the forest.
The boy stands looking at the fox
As if, if he looked long enough —
                                                       he looks at it.
Or is it the fox that’s looking at the boy?
The trees can’t tell the two of them apart.  
 
1965

 = Wayne Vargas