Before daybreak

Made more chill

The rocks

At Abuiquiu,

I saw the naked men

Tiny as the dew

In black light,

Hard the dull whips,

And saw blood

On earth at dawn

At dawn

The river passed,

A leaf

Beneath bare trees.

Yet I stay on.

The other day

I took the children

Of the mines

into the hills,

Thin voices

And stiff hair,

Bare feet of bone.

I stood alone

And saw the shaken

Wagons amid dust,

Red stone, red stone.

 

 

–Yvor Winters – “The Schoolmaster and the Queres of the Mines”, 1923

I imagine the time of our meeting

There among the forms of the earth at Abiquiu,

And other times that followed from the one –

An easy conjugation of stories,

And late luncheons of wine and cheese.

All around there were beautiful objects,

Clean and precise in their beauty, like bone.

The skulls of cows and sheep;

And the many smooth stones in the window,

In the flat winter light, were beautiful.

I wanted to feel the sun in the stones –

The ashen, far-flung winter sun –

But this I did not tell you, I believe,

But I believe that after all you knew.

And then, in those days, too,

I made you the gift of a small, brown stone,

And you described it with the tips of your fingers

And knew at once that it was beautiful –

At once, accordingly you knew,

As you knew the forms of the earth at Abiquiu:

That time involves them and they bear away,

Beautiful, various, remote,

In failing light, and in the coming of cold.

—N. Scott Momaday – “Forms of the Earth at Abiquiu”, 1976