Under branches of white lilac
They crop the wet grass just before dawn.
They move smokily through the half-light, smudge pots
Pulsing against a thick morning frost.
My watch glows like a small, improbable moon. Six o’clock.
I have been driving into the dark too long.
I pull to the side of the road.
I am a branch, a stone. The lambs are not aware of me.
They have been fading into the hillside
Like shadows that have peopled someone’s fever
In the shut room of a dilapidated farmhouse
Where the walls reiterate a spray of honeysuckle.
They ignore one another. They are blanketed with thistles,
A little out of sorts in this shabby light.
Five or six of them are wandering through a peach orchard,
Not even aware of my personal squalor.
What stumbles from their tongues is never music;
It is the echo of a badly damaged shell.
Now they are moving by a ditch of rainwater,
Inspected for flaws in the foggy mirror.
I walk into the field, I am not afraid of them –
They scatter like the last edges of a sickness.
The sun has begun to enlarge its tawny fleeces
At the expense of no one in particular.
Thomas James, 1946-1974 – “Lambs” from Letters to a Stranger
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