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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Baker

David Baker was born in Bangor, Maine, on December 27, 1954. He...
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	FURTHER READING


		Poems About the Natural World
		And the Intrepid Anthurium by Pura López-Colomé

		Atavism by Elinor Wylie

		Butterfly Catcher by Tina Cane

		Crossings by Ravi Shankar

		Elders by Louise Bogan

		Farewell by John Clare

		February: The Boy Breughel by Norman Dubie

		Field by Erin Belieu

		Fish Fucking by Michael Blumenthal

		For-The-Spirits-Who-Have-Rounded-The-Bend IIVAQSAAT by dg nanouk okpik

		Four Poems for Robin by Gary Snyder

		God's World by Edna St. Vincent Millay

		In a Blue Wood by Richard Levine

		In Michael Robins’s class minus one by Bob Hicok

		Kentucky River Junction by Wendell Berry

		maggie and milly and molly and may by E. E. Cummings

		Naskeag by Alfred Corn

		October (section I) by Louise Glück

		Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth

		Of Many Worlds in This World by Margaret Cavendish

		Pastoral by Jennifer Chang

		Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

		Poppies on the Wheat by Helen Hunt Jackson

		Russian Birch by Nathaniel Bellows

		Song of Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

		Spontaneous Me by Walt Whitman

		The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

		The Gladness of Nature by William Cullen Bryant

		The Leaves by Deborah Digges

		The Noble Nature by Ben Jonson

		The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Ezra Pound

		The Wind and the Moon by George Macdonald

		Trees by Joyce Kilmer

		Two Butterflies went out at Noon— (533) by Emily Dickinson

		What's the railroad to me? by Henry David Thoreau

		Winter Morning by William Jay Smith

		Work Without Hope by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Belong To

by David Baker

See the pair of us
                              Raining and morning

the first soft ashes
                              along the high road

running the far ridge
                              of pines ripped wild to

timbers by storming
                              to shreds see the white

shreds like coals like a
                              sudden sorrow see

the partial moon see
                              the cut sky see us

serene with singing
                              are we merry are

we rueful neither
                              is there sufficient

wording for what falls
                              all the muffled horns

pleading but too late
                              along the last route

of what remains can
                              you see us what can

you see there—lost leaves
                              waiting to come back

as leaves . . .

About this poem:

"One of my favorite ballads from the early 1950s is the song—recorded famously by both Patti Page and Jo Stafford—'You Belong to Me.' I wanted my poem to be full of echoes of the lyrics of that song and of several recent poems by poets I love. It is a poem of fragments, leavings, endings, overlapping tones and details, a poem of decasyllabic lines snapped in half but still perceptible, nearly, as a blank verse sonnet. 'See the pyramids along the Nile...'"

David Baker

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