
After the Rain After the rain, it’s time to walk the field again, near where the river bends. Each year I come to look for what this place will yield— lost things still rising here. The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail, a crop of arrowheads, but where or why they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail, dropped from an empty sky, Yet for an hour or two, after the rain has washed away the dusty afterbirth of their return, a few will show up plain on the reopened earth. Still, even these are hard to see— at first they look like any other stone. The trick to finding them is not to be too sure about what’s known; Conviction’s liable to say straight off this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay, and miss the point: after the rain, soft furrows show one way Across the field, but what is hidden here requires a different view—the glance of one not looking straight ahead, who in the clear light of the morning sun Simply keeps wandering across the rows, letting his own perspective change. After the rain, perhaps, something will show, glittering and strange. (Reprinted from Darkened Rooms of Summer.) Wanderer Where all the hills are silent now, and through the trees The wind, that once shook every bough and blossom, leaves Only the slightest breath. Here, birds, now half asleep, Content with songs that have no words, find shelter deep Within the forest. Here, release from constant quest, From endless pathways. Soon, like these, you too shall rest. (First published in Clementine Unbound.)
Jared Carter‘s most recent collection, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. His Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by Ted Kooser, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014. A recipient of several literary awards and fellowships, Carter is from the state of Indiana in the U.S.
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