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THE BOX OF GOD: 3. TALKING WATERS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: O eagle whose whistling wings have known the lift
Last Line: Somebody -- somebody's there, sleeping . . . Sleeping . . .


O eagle whose whistling wings have known the lift
Of high mysterious hands, and the wild sweet music
Of big winds among the ultimate stars,
The black-robes put you in a box of God,
Seeking in honest faith and holy zeal
To lay upon your lips new songs, to swell
The chorus of amens and hallelujahs.
O bundle of copper bones tossed in a hole,
Here in the place-of-death -- God's fenced-in ground! --
Beneath these put-in pines and waxen lilies,
They placed you in a crimson gash in the hillside,
Here on a bluff above the Sleepy-eye,
Where the Baptism River, mumbling among the canyons,
Shoulders its flood through crooning waterfalls
In a mist of wafted foam fragile as petals
Of windflowers blowing across the green of April;
Where ghosts of wistful leaves go floating up
In the rustling blaze of autumn, like silver smokes
Slenderly twisting among the thin blue winds;
Here in the great gray arms of Mont du Pere,
Where the shy arbutus, the mink, and the Johnny-jump-up
Huddle and whisper of a long, long winter;
Where stars, with soundless feet, come trooping up
To dance to the water-drums of white cascades --
Where stars, like little children, go singing down
The sky to the flute of the wind in the willow-tree --
Somebody -- somebody's there . . . O pagan Joe . . .
Can't you see Him as He moves among the mountains --
Where dusk, dew-lidded, slips among the valleys
Soft as a blue wolf walking in thick wet moss?
Look! . . . my friend! . . . at the breast of Mont du Pere! . . .
Sh-sh-sh-sh! . . . Don't you hear His talking waters . . .
Soft in the gloom as broken butterflies
Hovering above a somber pool . . . Sh-sh-sh-sh!
Somebody's there . . . in the heart of Mont du Pere . . .
Somebody -- somebody's there, sleeping . . . sleeping . . .





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