The Sheep Child

Farm boys wild to couple
With anythingwith soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earthmounds
Of pinestrawwill keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
SayI have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheeplike a woolly baby
Pickled in alcoholbecause
Those things can't live.his eyes
Are openbut you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasturebut we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?

Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may

Be sayingsaying

I am here, in my father's house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
Of sobbingof something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,

In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wood,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring. From dark grass I came straight

To my father's house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comespiling deep in a hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun's grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woodsinto bean fieldsthey go
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
They groanthey waitthey suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.