Hard as rock, I hide where you hide,
          behind the abdication of Fontainebleau:
          every boy an emperor! The rain remembers
          as you do. Treading gutters home
          to malodorous castles in forests of afternoon,
          we spent ourselves shouting like Napoleon.
          We were granted the principality of islands
          hard as rock. We had worn a continent down.
     
          The day was crazed, as if it had dismounted
          from its only eminence to stand beside
          an ordinary horse. How many of us forage
          as we ravage greenslopes for unavailable courage?
          Hidden with you behind my bedrock eyes,
          I watch bystanders for possible enemies
          as all little majors who are emperors do,
          and ride helter-skelter after spectres of  Fontainebleau.

                             HEARTLAND
                                  

           I close my eyes, I see the distance dance,
           I hear the detonation of mischance
           that fused the sand to glass and blew the light
           to blazes. The rivers of my heartland wait.
           I call them Mississippi and Missouri,
           great arteries of the inch and wild heart cherry,
           and I sleep in winter with beasts that want my night.
           I am their calm and warmth; my stove in the barn
           grazes the snow for them;  and rivers stay born.
           Because I have lived with the eagle of the prairie,
           I am this continent as long as its rivers last
           and no reaction burns them to old rope.
           An image has been taken from an anxious past
           that shrinks them; and what may be, is heartless hope.          
                                                       

                   THE TRAVELLING HOUSE

          Time is a house that travels, jogging down
          by horse and buggy to the parkland of the town
          where grandfather dismounts to give it a show of draughts;
          the board was metal and its pieces slung by shafts.
          He grooms his beard and wins the mornings for me
          in matches beneath the pepperina tree.

          I hand the mornings to my mother on her knees
          where they shine like a last resort and the checkered  years
          cease to crown us with their scrubbing pain;
          the house was time in a corrugated lane.
          I  pass them towards my father's hammering lunch
          and there they warm white knuckles at a bench.

          This was my house and the givers of mornings it won;
          and it stands like the house I am that I pass on.