North Country

North Country, filled with gesturing wood,

With trees that fence, like archers' volleys,

The flanks of hidden

Where nothing's left to

But verticals and perpendiculars,

Like rain gone wooden, fixed in falling,

Or fingers blindly

For what nobody cares;

Or trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death,

Stuck with black staghorns, quietly sucking,

And trees whose boughs go seeking,

And tress like broken

With smoky antlers broken in the sky;

Or trunks that lie grotesquely rigid,

Like bodies blank and wretched After a fool's battue,

As if they've secret ways of dying

And secret places for their

When boughs at last

Their clench of blowing air But this gaunt country, filled with mills and saws,

With butter-works and

And public institutions,

And scornful rumps of cows,

North Country, filled with gesturing wood–Timber's the end it gives to branches,

Cut off in cubic inches,

Dripping red with blood.