A poem by Stan Raines

At seven years
The world was a whirl of trees,
Houses, stones, and fields.
Moving objects, alive,
Tumbling in the head.

The world needed fixing.
Summer paced it out.
Young hands drew it down.
Along the creek bed,
Between the houses,
Ancient blood in young veins
Marked the tread
Of flowing waters.

Each knee-bruising rock,
Each stone smoothed by young seats,
Each tree larger than a wrist
(Which did not take much tree),
Each bend and wind
And drop of bed,
Tagged and noted,
Marked and fixed.

Till last of all,
Creek tumbled into river.
The land is known.
The land is good.

The ancients would approve.

Author’s note: This is an older poem, written sometime in the Seventies and included in my little chapbook, Poems of Youth. I have no real explanation for its genesis or meaning except to note that, in many respects, I had been left alone through much of my childhood and made, at last, my own council. I do not know if this was a generational thing–we Boomers were the first generation dumped in front of TV to accomodate working and missing parents, not to discount the importance of all the modes of child abandonment from beggary to poorhouse to abandonment in mines and factories concocted since the beginning of the industrial revolution–and this concern with the physical arrangement of the world, naming and thus nailing things down, was part of that council.