Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin

Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles

One by one lift themselves out of the fence line

And slowly leap on the gray sky—

And past them, the snowy fields.

The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields

In Wisconsin: and on these black trees

Scattered, one by one,

Through the winter fields—

We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,

And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the combine.

It is a pleasure, also, to be driving

Toward Chicago, near dark,

And see the lights in the barns.

The bare trees more dignified than ever,

Like a fierce man on his deathbed,

And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.