These Winter Dunes

I SIT over the lake on a hill of sand;
Gold lights and purple shadows, the playing forms,
Weave on the swift shuttles and are withdrawn.
Other hills are carved in rock, these mounds of the wind
Continually melt and change, wakening
The sweet tenderness of impermanent things.

Ridge after ridge, brown leaves on the yellow blowing,
Clumps of dry grass, the bare fabric of trees —
When this detail has melted, vegetation and air,
The sand will lie like rock in the cold unmoving
Before-and-after of the moon’s vacancies —
Now love like a vine works round and attaches here.

That far-off smoke is Gary, the steel mills.
Here solitude. Nobody. There is nothing at all,
But the lake and ice-hills thawing, the taller hills
Of sand that quietly shift in the mothering swell
Of the wind and soften into grass and leaves.
Geese go northward; over the water a gull grieves.

A whistle bleats at the last faint line of the woods.
This whole stretch is waiting; it is already owned
By a great corporation; they bide their time.
Soon it will be factories and apartment homes,
A well-fed people, but involved in the doom
Of shifting things, knowing no permanent goods.

If there are strangers still coming to this great land,
Tell them out of pity, and make it plain,
Not to love what they find; or if love surprise
(As we are weak), let it be of a special kind,
Quick and evasive; for here all things will change
Before the fruit can ripen on the vine.

That is why I take this place and moment
An image of our being, a man alone,
Loving the shapes of sun in a bank of sand,
And over all landscapes hold these winter dunes—
Gold lights and purple shadows, the heartbreaking forms
That weave on the restless looms and at once are withdrawn.