Scouting - Philip Levine

.
I’m the man who gets off the bus
at the bare junction of nothing
with nothing, and then heads back
to where we’ve been as though
the future were stashed somewhere
in that tangle of events we call
“Where I come from.” Where I
came from the fences ran right
down to the road, and the lone woman
leaning back on her front porch as she
quietly smoked asked me what did
I want. Confused as always, I
answered, “Water,” and she came to me
with a frosted bottle and a cup,
shook my hand, and said, “Good lick.”
That was forty years ago, you say,
when anything was possible. No,
it was yesterday, the gray icebox
sat on the front porch, the crop
was tobacco and not yet in, you
could hear it sighing out back.
The rocker gradually slowed as
she came toward me but never 
stopped and the two of us went on
living in time. One of her eyes
had a pale cast and looked nowhere
or into the future where without
regrets she would give up the power
to grant life, and I would darken
like wood left in the rain and then
fade into only a hint of the grain.
I went higher up the mountain
until my breath came in gasps,
my sight darkened, and I slept
to the side of the road to waken
chilled in the sudden July cold,
alone and well. What is it like
to come to, nowhere, in darkness,
not knowing who you are, not
caring if the wind calms, the stars
stall in their sudden orbits,
the cities below go on without
you screaming and singing?
I don’t have the answer. I’m
scouting, getting the feel
of the land, the way the fields
step down the mountainsides
hugging their battered, sagging
wire fences to themselves as though
both day and night they needed
to know their limits. Almost still
the silent dogs wound into sleep,
the gray cabins breathing steadily
in moonlight, tomorrow wakening
slowly in the clumps of mountain oak
and pine where streams once ran
down the little white rock gullies.
You can feel the whole country
wanting to waken into a child’s dream,
you can feel the moment reaching 
back to contain your life and forward
to whatever the dawn brings you to.
In the dark you can love this place.

Peachy

Absorbing and being absorbed.

The scary, self-embalming, pickled peach.

I can’t bear to look at you untrue, in unnatural brashness.

Who’s pride do you measure by? Not mine. You’re a good egg I said:

‘You’re peachy.’

Its just,

 you’ve stuck your face on sadly.

Sour plum skin, crowded by cobbles,

and quiffs of tufted catkin.

Where corals in outcrops are wrinkly things, that channel chased ink,

under shadowy brows.

Wells of pooling blues, look at me look at you, sunken squid.

Where pinkness peeks from worries branching out, a forest of thorns.

Before you.

Where are your lips? Underkissed. Where is your tongue?

 Swimming in vinegar.

Don’t be preserved changed, pre pickled for your prime by some

witches hex.

You’ll be marked by the way you frown, not by the way you laugh.

And what’s the good in that

  for a bowl of old cherries.