The Lease. Mathew Henderson

      Copyright © Mathew Henderson, 2012

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      Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in publication

      Henderson, Mathew, 1985

      The Lease / Mathew Henderson.

      Poems.

      eISBN 978-1-77056-322-3

      I. Title.

      PS8615.E525L43 2012 cC811′.6 C2012-904680-9

      THE RANCH

      You sleep on stacked mattresses and mice run

      the floor, biting at toes; you wake, set traps

      and stack the mattresses higher still.

      This is old Sask summer: flax and mustard

      paint the horizon the bright yellow colour of sun

      you find in children’s pictures, and always

      the sky is just another dead prairie above you.

      Everything you remember lives inside

      the chicken-farm homestead

      with its back-broken frame and that reek

      of old water sitting still. At night the house breathes

      with open windows, swells at the seams.

      At sunrise, it exhales a dust so fine

      you think of bull hearts, dried and ground.

      When it’s gutted of furniture, you find imprints

      in the carpet: four beds, two dressers, a shelf.

      And from those years when no one kept it,

      from before the oil and the oilmen came, the mark

      where the deer walked in, lay down and died.

      FENCELESS

      There are no signposts, no old men waiting

      to tell you here. This place repeats itself;

      everywhere you’ve been is folded into grass

      and dirt, and you blame chance, not science,

      for putting the iron here, like no seismic charts

      were read, no holes drilled, as if wealthy men

      and god just wanted you sweating in the mud.

      But the cows, they can find borders even under

      daylight’s sterile sun, watch nations grow

      from boot prints, divide the plain by men

      and else. They graze away, uncountable,

      unheard as you walk the field, tool to tool,

      with no sense of what is yours, and what is not.

      THE TANK

      Squats three days at a time in white-brown mud

      that sticks and sucks, like a mouth, against

      everything it touches. The long battle,

      the bit-by-bit of urging steel to the centre

      of the earth. You dream of sinking, past

      the slow riot of oil, sand and stone,

      to the bottom of the prairie shield.

      Rig out. The pylons packed, extinguishers

      strapped, the guy wires of the stack, plucked,

      swing loose again against the sky. Everything ends,

      briefly, and the iron world moves on.

      Only the tire ruts are left, six inches

      deep, wet with water and an oil sheen,

      and even these are eaten over by wheat

      and flax and mustard seeds.

      No mark survives this place: you too will yield

      to unmemory. Give everything you are

      in three-day pieces. Watch the gypsy iron

      move, follow its commands.

      Tend the rusted steel like a shepherd.

      WASHOUT

      Across the field you can see a farm girl who might be pretty,

      stripped down and out of her father’s coveralls.

      Might get you hard if she wasn’t hidden so well.

      Kinda gets you hard anyway, as she climbs the tractor,

      her legs bouncing against the sides of her loose rubber boots.

      Remember where you came from? What the girls were like there?

      Now open the fucking well and walk the pipe like a healer,

      your ungloved palm hovering over the unions.

      She’s in the tractor now, over there, radio on,

      windows cracked, texting a guy from school while you hit

      the first sandoff of the day – ball frack, zone two,

      and Bill tells you, Right now, down below, there’s enough nitrogen,

       sand and shit to shoot one of those fat fuck thousand-pounders

       from TV right the fuck out of his bed, so open that bastard slow.

      And then, Nevermind, and he does it himself.

      The thin pipe rattles, your lightest pipe, the stuff you solo

      around the lease on your shoulder. The whole line kicks

      and, standing beside the flowback tank, the noise is older

      than anything you’ve ever heard, like you’ve always been hearing it,

      and just now became aware. The first time you drove a car

      the engine kicked, sounded like a coil cleanout,

      a blowdown, a frack, a bleedoff. When you learned to

      knead dough, your father’s palms over your hands,

      there was a man outside punching holes in the earth,

      making your mother’s windows buzz and rattle.