Poem (there is no touch)

This poem gets stuck in my diaphragm.

This Song

by Hayden Carruth

In an afternoon bright with

September, or in an old dissension

bright with fear, I went wandering where

there was purity in white lady's tresses,

hiddenness in peeping bluebottle gentians,

and where many species of goldenrod

and asters made funeral for the lost

summer world, and ferns, taken by frost,

made russet the fields and turned

the waysides yellow and brown.

It struck me that I had wandered all my years

like this, half a century, searching

for the touch that heals, but there is

no touch; searching everywhere for the

look that say I know, but there is

no look. This is Vermont, the land

hidden from violent times, far from the center

of life, they say. I walk by the gray brook,

around the knoll, through the pines. Winter

is coming. Searching, searching with my hand,

I feel September's little knives, and with my eyes

I see bright spattered leaves in the matted

grass. I hear this song, if it be a song: these

insistent little bright fearful hesitant

murmurs from high in the old pine trees.