THE RETURN FROM THE DANCE HALL
The old fathers in stiff clothes,
They too, one summer's evening, passed through the door,
And the small immortal flame
In bee time
Danced in their eyes.
Late at night, returning from the dance hall,
They pissed in the canal
Against the cemetery wall,
And from the surrounding silence strong as a mountain
Fell the poplars' torrent of silk.
Already many dead were at work under the earth,
But with Sunday and even forgetting they were calmed,
And the overturned harrow at a field's edge gleamed,
Holding between its teeth hay mixed with stars.
They called out at the hill's halfmark:
For no reason, for pleasure, to hear
Their voices lost at the far end of barns, of lofts
Filled with wheat turbulent as women's bodies,
In the rumor busily running as always under the night.
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