From the Book 
 GREETING 
 Drive down a lightly graveled road 
 between a field of corn and a field of soybeans. 
 Turn off the engine. Open 
 the windows. This is very important. 
 How else can you 
 smell the purple clover? 
 Your life is a tree 
 in all this open space. 
 And the birds-- 
 sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, robins, 
 mourning doves, swallows-- 
 they do not need your life. 
 This is a good 
 thing. You are lonely enough 
 for yourself to bear. 
 It is June. 
 Stay until the corn 
 is so tall a child could 
 walk into it and disappear. 
 It will not seem like 
 a long wait. 
 Look at the sky, the silver shapes 
 going about their own 
 stately business. 
 When you 
 walk out of the whispering corn 
 you will get into the car, 
 sit in front of the steering wheel. 
 You will wonder how you got 
 old enough to drive, big 
 enough to reach the pedals. 
 Smile in greeting. Tell yourself to 
 smell the clover, watch the birds. 
 Tell yourself welcome. 
 Tell yourself 
 all the stories you know. 
 MY FATHER IN ILLINOIS 
 His hands are effete, worried, 
 vaguely incompetent, 
 but he is building the inside of a barn 
 for horses, spacious stalls 
 with double-hung doors so balanced 
 a child will open and close them easily 
 all her life 
 until she is ten and has to leave. 
 For him, this place is a desert island 
 on which he is marooned. Around him the flat, 
 becalmed fields, too open to the sky. 
 No hills, no trees, no cold, sweet streams. 
 He must work, or die. 
 I want to know 
 how he could not love 
 this farm, this barn 
 with its good strong wood 
 that he precisely cut and nailed, 
 the beams and rafters becoming 
 the frame of the ship I sail in dreams 
 ever after. 
 He lets the tape measure swallow itself 
 and looks down the dim aisle 
 towards the future me. 
 "It's not Pennsylvania," he says, 
 and both of us, forever castaways, 
 turn to our separate endeavors.