Regard an American farm.
That jaded collaborator,
Daylight, has just arrived.
Wavy signal of smoke
From the wooden farm-house disappears
Beneath the bluely ascetic lack of interest.
Horses, pigs, and cows
Assemble their discontent.
The result is a Chinese orchestra
Devoid of discipline and cohesion,
With all of the players intoxicated.
The animals do not realize
That their voices should portray
The farmer in the angular house;
The hackneyed prose of his life;
The expanding soul of his corn-fields.
Turn from the absence of human wisdom
And see the lights in the farm-house.
Dimly circumscribed and steady,
They symbolize future events.
The farm-hand walks to the barn,
With an ox-like dragging of feet.
Black shirt, and overalls
Whose color has been removed by dirt,
Obscure the heavy knots of his body.
His cork-screw nose ascends
To the eyes of an unperturbed pig.
Love and hate to him
Are mouthfuls of coarse food hastily gulped
During lulls in his muscular slavery.
Beneath the slanting pungency
Of the barn he vanishes,
And with meaningless sounds
He pays his meager tribute to life.
Then the farmer persuades his age
To indulge in an unwilling stumble
Across the yard.
His grey beard is the end of a rope
That has gradually throttled his face.
Within him, avarice
Is awkwardly practising the rhythms
Of weak emotions benignly, belatedly
Preparing for celestial rewards.
Within the cluttered farm-yard
He stands, a figure of niggardly order.

Earth, the men who scrape at your flanks
Can never stop to examine
The thin line of speech that goes adventuring
Where your brown hills bite the sky.