Recordings: Joseph Langland
Reading Some of his Work

"You have to love the sound of language. As though the quality of the idea could exist apart from the quality of the language."

(Audio Recording Coming Soon)

Lost Faces

Then,
turning the corner of our little town
in southeastern Minnesota,
I came upon your face, aloft in light,
held to a shadowed angle in the sun.

I had never met you before, never in all the world,
but there you were, there in my little town,
as though you had always been
walking there up and down.

Nothing seemed out of place,
your dress, your hair, the color of your eyes,
the contours of your face.
It was so natural, so absolute a grace
that there was no surprise...

only, by chance,
some recognition in your glance
that parted my lips to say hello
to someone I had never known.

You seemed, at once, a neighbor to my heart
and made a usual day of wind and sun
with white clouds drifting in the sky
so strangely local that we seemed to step
right from the sidewalk to each other's arms,

although we only paused
a second at that corner there, no more,
and barely touched each other, passing though a door
of shade and sunlight, hinged upon our hands,
took a few troubled steps,
looked backward, but at different times,
and went on to our private lands.

It was as though the quickened heart had sent
a frontier expedition from its breast
across the Mississippi, going west,
and rode the far Dakotas, mound and plain,
two thousand miles of wilderness and rain,
while all the sky
abstracted in its own renown
to one blue eye,
sent back into my life and to my town
only its mute report,

as though eternity had made a stop
somewhere west of hte mountains where the mind,
body and heart,
might sit on a sunny headland, gazing out
past rock and wave and mist of what we are and seem
upon the blue Pacific, like a dream.