If I could draw poetry out of lonely places,
I’d have a hundred books under my name,
or at least a trunkful of manuscript papers.
I think every wood and desolate field I ever saw
has somehow entered into me.
I’ve looked down dismal alleys late at night
and never forgotten them for forty years.
I see bleak places from train windows:
the shabby yard, the sour mildewed marsh,
the cracked road leading nowhere.
I remember buildings with blistered clapboards
warped, untended, tinder-dry.
I’ve seen so many sad forsaken streets
I could walk them in nightmare till the end of time.
