An Explanation Of America: A Love Of Death Poem Rhyme Scheme

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Imagine a child from Virginia or New Hampshire	A
Alone on the prairie eighty years ago	B
Or more one afternoon the shaggy pelt	C
Of grasses for the first time in that child s life	D
Flowing for miles Imagine the moving shadow	B
Of a cloud far off across that shadeless ocean	E
The obliterating strangeness like a tide	F
That pulls or empties the bubble of the child s	G
Imaginary heart No hills no trees	H
	-
The child s heart lightens tending like a bubble	I
Towards the currents of the grass and sky	J
The pure potential of the clear blank spaces	K
	-
Or imagine the child in a draw that holds a garden	E
Cupped from the limitless motion of the prairie	L
Head resting against a pumpkin in evening sun	E
Ground cherry bushes grow along the furrows	K
The fruit red under its papery moth shaped sheath	M
Grasshoppers tumble among the vines as large	N
As dragons in the crumbs of pale dry earth	O
The ground is warm to the child s cheek and the wind	P
Is a humming sound in the grass above the draw	Q
Rippling the shadows of the red green blades	K
The bubble of the child s heart melts a little	I
Because the quiet of that air and earth	O
Is like the shadow of a peaceful death	R
Limitless and potential a kind of space	K
Where one dissolves to become a part of something	S
Entire whether of sun and air or goodness	K
And knowledge it does not matter to the child	T
Dissolved among the particles of the garden	E
Or into the motion of the grass and air	U
Imagine the child happy to be a thing	S
	-
Imagine then that on that same wide prairie	L
Some people are threshing in the terrible heat	V
With horses and machines cutting bands	K
And shoveling amid the clatter of the threshers	K
The chaff in prickly clouds and the naked sun	E
Burning as if it could set the chaff on fire	A
Imagine that the people are Swedes or Germans	K
Some of them resting pressed against the strawstacks	K
Trying to get the meager shade	W
A man	X
A tramp comes laboring across the stubble	I
Like a mirage against that blank horizon	E
Laboring in his torn shoes toward the tall	Y
Mirage like images of the tilted threshers	K
Clattering in the heat Because the Swedes	K
Or Germans have no beer or else because	K
They cannot speak his language properly	L
Or for some reason one cannot imagine	E
The man climbs up on a thresher and cuts bands	K
A minute or two then waves to one of the people	I
A young girl or a child and jumps head first	Z
Into the sucking mouth of the machine	A2
Where he is wedged and beat and cut to pieces	K
While the people shout and run in the clouds of chaff	B2
Like lost mirages on the pelt of prairie	L
	-
The obliterating strangeness and the spaces	K
Are as hard to imagine as the love of death	R
Which is the love of an entire strangeness	K
The contagious blankness of a quiet plain	C2
Imagine that a man who had seen a prairie	L
Should write a poem about a Dark or Shadow	B
That seemed to be both his and the prairie s as if	D2
The shadow proved that he was not a man	X
But something that lived in quiet like the grass	K
Imagine that the man who writes that poem	E2
Stunned by the loneliness of that wide pelt	C
Should prove to himself that he was like a shadow	B
Or like an animal living in the dark	F2
In the dark proof he finds in his poem the man	X
Might come to think of himself as the very prairie	L
The sod itself not lonely and immune to death	R
	-
None of this happens precisely as I try	J
To imagine that it does in the empty plains	K
And yet it happens in the imagination	E
Of part of the country not in any place	K
More than another on the map but rather	A
Like a place where you and I have never been	G2
And need to try to imagine place like a prairie	L
Where immigrants in the obliterating strangeness	K
Thirst for the wide contagion of the shadow	B
Or prairie where you and I with our other ways	K
More like the cities or the hills or trees	K
Less like the clear blank spaces with their potential	I
Are like strangers in a place we must imagine	E

Robert Pinsky

An Explanation Of America: A Love Of Death Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis

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