Head of Sorrow, Head of Thought

You would think that no one

had the right to so much

distance and calm.

And yet how often do we see,

clouded and still,

the face of someone gone

out of himself

into stone or water?

The rider in the train,

escaped into the glass fields;

the watcher in the garden,

changed once to a leaf,

now to the cold light on a

pond.

Face of the storm, we say,

we have faced you,

heard you howling within,

quelling the atoms

of a bruised, exacting heart

. . .

She, who out of the tempest,

came to this calm,

gazing as if from a distance

made equally of granite and

cloud.

1985

From “New Poems: 1980-1988” (Story Line Press: $9.95 paperback; 96 pp.; 0-934257-45-0). A former recipient of an Alaska State Council on the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Haines has homesteaded in Alaska for more than a quarter of a century. For the last two years, he has served as a guest writer - in - residence at Ohio University. 1990, John Haines. Reprinted by permission of Story Line Press.