Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Photo by UNL Publications and Photography.

In many of those Japanese paintings with Mt. Fuji in the background, we find tiny figures moving along under the immensity of the landscape.

Here’s an American version of a scene like that, by Stanley Plumly of Maryland, one of our country’s most accomplished poets.

Off A Side Road Near Staunton

Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere,

an early autumn stillness in the air,

the kind of empty day you fill by taking in

the full size of the valley and its layers leading

slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country,

if you stand here long enough, you could stay

for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall,

pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall

meadow, high above the harvest, perfect

to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent

sunlit smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains,

though you could walk until it’s dark and not reach those rains—

you could walk the rest of the day into the picture

and not know why, at any given moment, you’re there.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly. Copyright ©2007 by Stanley Plumly. Used by permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.