_Looking Toward Peoria ____________
July’s scythe levels air.
What season must we become, what
Thrush singing in its song.
The bold phrasing of cornfields
Articulates nothing
But a westward leaning.
Beginning simply
With embraces and limits,
Something soon must tell us
What grows in the cold,
What requires
—in neat parenthesis—
Our bones.
After supper
All talk is incidental
And straight
As a rural road.
When we take to front-porch
Fiddling, we stir
Murmurs of distance:
A leaf in millstream;
Two miles of boxcars
Chasing fast for home.
“Looking toward Peoria” appeared in Walking the Blind Dog (University of Illinois Press, 1992). Copyright © 1992 by G. E. Murray.
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