Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Monday, August 31st, 2020.

Today's poem is by an American poet, literary critic, and anthologist and teacher named Hayden Carruth.

He lived from August 3, 1921, to September 29th, 2008.

Carruth wrote 30 books of poetry, worked for poetry magazine, and was an advisory editor

of the Hudson Review. He was also awarded a Guggenheim, the National Book Award, the Lennon

Literary Award, the Carl Sandberg Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Patterson

Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and other awards. So he's a quite revered poet of the latter half of the 20th century.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Abandoned Ranch Big Bend.

You can find this poem in a book called Collected Shorter Poems.

It goes like this.

Three people come where no people belong anymore. They are a woman who would be young

and good-looking if these now seemed real qualities. A child with yellow hair.

A man hardened.

A man hardened in desperate humanity.

But here are only dry cistern, adobe flaking, a lizard.

And now this disagreeable feeling that they were summoned.

Sun on the corrugated roof is a horse treading, a horse with wide wings and heavy hooves.

The lizard is splayed, head down on the wall, pulsing.

They do not bother to lift their binoculars to the shimmering distance

from this dead center of the desert spirals away,

traveling outward and inward, pulsing.

Summoned from half across the world, from snow and rock, from chaos, they arrived a moment ago,

...