Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry.
— Job 22:7, KJV
Then they found themselves
in the usual corridors,
the backroads and oak-stands,
following the ghost ruts
of extinct wagon-roads
in yellow fields where fences
drooped their abused wires,
coming expertly to a sequestered place,
berries on shining wood swelling
like tiny apples, and a ragged
melody rising from the radio
in the farmhouse where they
spoke in the language that would
become the old language, and
the arrangements were made, and
of a night in distinct back-seat
Oldsmobiles they came, carrying
the signs of the chosen, the bedbug,
the headlouse, the deep wet lung
of bacilli, packing the wooden
rosary and the vigil candle
and making their way in narrow file
along the night trails that paralleled
the cataracts of light roaring freeway
and pilgrim, shuddering in the swift cold
and the swift sex of flight. And after all,
it would seem impossible to die here
among such abundance and garish blessing—
or then to die having seen a land
driven beyond any simple category of
good or evil—rising from the dusky
fields, the certain camps, the secret
pews of select churches and hanging
the familiar herbs in the windows of
walk-up, two-family kitchens, sowing
the asphalt roadways of the earth with labor,
saying nothing because God’s language
is not language, and the passage
from one life to another can never
be death, and what has been withheld
counts for nothing in the mysterious
ledgers of this world, this place where
they themselves refuse to give up nothing.
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