Beyond the Red River, poem by Thomas McGrath

BEYOND THE RED RIVER
By Thomas McGrath

The birds have flown their summer skies to the south,
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.
 
A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea,
A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses
Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping
An aging whiskey of distances and departures.
 
Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.
My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave.
I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe,
Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.

“Beyond the Red River” appears in Thomas McGrath‘s Selected Poems 1938-1988 (Copper Canyon Press, 1988).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas Matthew McGrath (1916-1990) was a celebrated American poet. McGrath grew up on a farm in Ransom County, North Dakota, and earned a B.A. from the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. He served in the Aleutian Islands with the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, and was later awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. McGrath also pursued postgraduate studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He taught at Colby College in Maine and at Los Angeles State College, from which he was dismissed in connection with his appearance, as an unfriendly witness, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953. Later he taught at North Dakota State University, and Minnesota State University, Moorhead.  McGrath wrote mainly about his own life and social concerns. His best-known work is Letter to an Imaginary Friend published in sections between 1957 and 1985 and as a single poem in 1997 by Copper Canyon Press. (Read more at wikipedia.org.)

PHOTO: “Red leaf in pool by river” by S. Mammoser, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED