Isolation

DO YOU notice nothing, not the mare
Ripe brown and restlessly alone
Cowered from the wind lashing the blond mane?
Do you hear nothing? Are you not aware
When the delicate calves under the damp stone
Walls of barns complain?

Not my country this where men stand
Irrelevant upon enormous fields.
I am the stranger inland from the sea.
The dun bull, the rooting pig, the bland
Mule — all the fattening landscape yields
Signs unread for me.

I have studied the waters, I have seen
Death by drowning. I have strained my ears
After the keeled ship, the lost sound.
Death by water most the earth fears.
But of the air? How can you not attend?
Are you the undistressed by the wind’s sound,
Susceptible to nothing earth yields,
Seeing irrelevance upon your fields,
Deaf to the distant portents of the sea?
The wind is a trouble to seamen. Land
And water lie one under the wind.