What I walked down to the highway for,
through the summer dawn,
was the Sunday funnies,
or so I thought—
but what I remember reading there
in the shadowless light
among meadowlarks singing
was tracks in the deep warm dust
of the lane, where it parted
with its beige dryness the meadow's dew—
the sleek trail where a snake had crossed
and slid into tall grass;
the stippled parallels
with marks between them where
a black blister-beetle had dragged
its bulbous belly across
in search of weeds more green;
the labyrinth of lacelike
dimples left by a speed-freak
tiger-beetles's sprints that ended
where it took wing
with a little blur of dust-grains;
and stepping through the beetle-trails,
the wedge-heels and sharp-clawed hands of skunk-track
crossing unhurried and walking
along the ditch to find
an easy place for climbing;
not far past that,
a line of cat-prints running
straight down the lane and ending
with deep marks where it leaped
across the ditch to the meadow
for birds asleep or wandering baby rabbits:
and freshly placed this morning,
the slender runes
of bob-whites running, scuffles
of dustbaths taken—
and there ahead
crouched low at the lane-edge
under purple pokeweed-berries
four quail had seen me,
and when I walked slowly
on toward them, instead
of flying they ran
with a fluid scuttling
on down the lane and stopped frozen
till I came too close
—then quietly when
I expected an explosion
of wings they took off low and whispering
and sailed, rocking and tilting
out over the meadow's tall bluestem,
dropped down and were gone until
I heard them whistling, down by the little pond,
and whistled back so sharply
that when I got back to the house
they still were answering
and one flew into the elm
and whistled from its shadows
up over the porch where I sat
reading the funnies while the kittens
played with the headlines
till when the first gold sunlight
tipped the elm's leaves he flew
back out to the meadow and sank
down into the sun-brilliant dew
on curving wings,
and my brothers and sisters waked
by the whistling came pouring out
onto the porch and claimed their share
of the Sunday funnies—
and I went on to read
the headlines of World War Two,
with maps of the struggling armies leaving
tank-tracks over the dunes of Libya
and the navies churning their wakes
of phosphorescence in the Coral Sea
where the ships went down on fire
and the waves bobbed and flamed
with the maimed survivors , screaming
in Japanese or English until
their gasoline-blistered heads
sank down to the tiger sharks
and the war was lost or won
for children sitting in sunlight,
believing their cause was just
and knowing it would prevail,
as the dew vanished away.