What Kind of Times Are These

What Kind of Times Are

Adrienne

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows                  uphilland the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadowsnear a meeting-house abandoned by the persecutedwho disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but                   don’t be fooledthis isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light—ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell youanything?

Because you still listen, because in times like theseto have you listen at all, it’s necessaryto talk about trees.1991[From Later Poems Selected and New: 1971-2012.

W.

W.

Norton & Company, 2013]