Dragon Country

Lyrics

This poem is called "Dragon Country: To Jacob Boehme." It's based on a line I encountered many years ago in Lowell's translation of Boehme. The poem is in quatrains, rhyming ABAB, roughly iambic pentameter. This is the dragon's country, and these his own streams. The slime on the railroad rails is where he has crossed the track. On a frosty morning, that field mist is where his great turd steams. And there are those who have gone forth and not come back. I was only a boy whеn Jack Simms reported the first dеpradation. What something had done to his hog pen. They called him a God-damn liar. Then said it must be a bear, after some had viewed the location, With fence rails, like matchwood, splintered, and earth a bloody mire. But no bear had been seen in the county in fifty years, they knew. It was something to say, merely that, for people compelled to explain What, standing in natural daylight, they couldn't believe to be true; And saying the words, one felt in the chest a constrictive pain. At least, some admitted this later, when things had got to the worst— When, for instance, they found in the woods the wagon turned on its side, Mules torn from trace chains, and you saw how the harness had burst. Spectators averted the face from the spot where the teamster had died. But that was long back, in my youth, just the first of case after case. The great hunts fizzled. You followed the track of disrepair, Ruined fence, blood-smear, brush broken, but came in the tend to a place With weed unbent and leaf calm—and nothing, nothing, was there. So what, in God's name, could men think when they couldn't bring to bay That belly-dragging earth-evil, but found that it took to air? Thirty-thirty or buckshot might fail, but then at least you could say You had faced it—assuming, of course, that you had survived the affair. We were promised troops, the Guard, but the Governor's skin got thin When up in New York the papers called him Saint George of Kentucky. Yes, even the Louisville reporters who came to Todd County would grin. Reporters, though rarely, still come. No one talks. They think it unlucky. If a man disappears—well, the fact is something to hide. The family says, gone to Akron, or up to Ford, in Detroit. When we found Jebb Johnson's boot, with the leg, what was left, inside, His mother said, no, it's not his. So we took it out to destroy it. Land values are falling, no longer do lovers in moonlight go. The rabbit, thoughtless of air gun, in the nearest pasture cavorts. Now certain fields go untended, the local birth rate goes low. The coon dips his little black paw in the riffle where he nightly resorts. Yes, other sections have problems somewhat different from ours. Their crops may fail, bank rates rise, loans at rumor of war be called, But we feel removed from the maneuvers of Russia, or other great powers, And from much ordinary hope we are now disenthralled. The Catholics have sent in a mission, Baptists report new attendance. But all that's off the point! We are human, and the human heart Demands language for reality that has not the slightest dependence On desire, or need—and in church fools pray only that the Beast depart. But if the Beast were withdrawn now, life might dwindle again To the ennui, the pleasure, and the night sweat, known in the time before Necessity of truth had trodden the land, and our hearts, to pain, And left, in darkness, the fearful glimmer of joy, like a spoor.