Название | Pruning Burning Bushes |
---|---|
Автор произведения | Sarah M. Wells |
Жанр | Зарубежные стихи |
Серия | |
Издательство | Зарубежные стихи |
Год выпуска | 0 |
isbn | 9781630879136 |
to our revolutionaries. This earth
is ours, its harvest, its rot. This ladder
has our dirt tucked between the crevices
of every letter. I reach and reach,
polish whatever skin I can and trip
over the broken treads, all repeat
American, American, American,
until I reach the peak and slide, hot metal burning.
Ohio
I. Against the Ground
I was wheat-field flat and growing
into rolling foothills. Somewhere in me
were illuminated cities waiting for dawn,
but my factory towns slipped into dusk,
their single-panes broken against mid-day light.
I did not see myself deciduous,
shedding cherry blossoms like wilted promises.
The spruce with its blush of blue growth
led me to believe I was evergreen, but even that
cannot withstand six months of winter salt, of ash.
Snow melts before it hits the earth
as rain in a season I pretend is spring
because the crocus and daffodil return
and the factories churn out shopping marts
and parking lots filled with rusted pick-up trucks.
I wait, perched on my steel I-beam,
for the college students to come home,
but it is spring, and the frost returns to kill the buds
before they’ve bloomed. The Earth turns,
pushes fieldstones into my hands for harvest
before the plow restores the hollowed stalks
of last year’s crop into the dirt. Earthworms
labor alongside the farmer who toils
against the ground, ready for the slow shiver
of crops, slow billow of hope.
II. Soup of the Day
I only knew the many ways to cook
zucchini because there was so much of it
and I was tired
of fried, tired of bread, tired of grilled.
I do not sauté; I sauce, I boil, I butter and boy,
my boys grow tall.
But now I am old. Unyielding. I do not produce
as much food as I used to. My fields are named
suburban neighborhoods.
I eat the meat of other states and export
grain-fed college kids. I do not know
how to behave
in this marketplace, how to diversify my menu,
integrate new ingredients. Entrees remain the same.
I do not change.
III. Histories
I hold my histories
like apologies,
named the river Cuyahoga and walk
a crooked path past Flats
of abandoned restaurants, wander
Geauga County trapping
the raccoon here
and releasing it there,
out of sight,
trace the large creek that meanders
the southern border, utter Ohio
and do not know or remember
the Seneca Indians
would not have added “river”
to the end, just Ohio.
The Pigs
Dad revived the barn—its siding stripped
for a neighbor’s cabinets, the grooved tin roof
rattling in wind on top of rotten trusses—
he buried sagging basement cow stalls
with Midwestern clay and silt, poured cement.
A makeshift pen and pump raised up
our three weaned piglets. I flung half-eaten cobs
in their feeder, rubbed wet snouts,
scratched behind ears, pet stubbled backs.
They rooted, trotted, rolled, and pissed.
We named them Buster, Pinky, Red, and watched
with rested arms on rails for hours.
They escaped one day—split the hillside,
squealed and darted through the valley—
freedom wild in frantic hooves.
I chased Buster with a stick, the dog leash
in my hand dragging through new top soil
in the cul-de-sac. He left prints in bluegrass,
clicked across asphalt driveways and startled
Labradors on porches with his sunburned skin,
until I caught him, walked him home
past landscaped beds. We corralled the hogs
into a truck backed up to the barn on Labor Day.
The concrete floor is clean, a water pump
drips and rusts. The barn cat slinks between
some soggy bales of straw. Look through the gaps
in slats Dad hung. A harvester shredded
cornstalks here, silage suspended in the air.
The sun hung long and bright above the trees
all evening, shadows cast for deer to wander
undetected through rows, acres of long, unending rows.
Instructions for the Excavator
for my father
When you bury a horse
for a neighbor, bring the backhoe
over, dig a trench, tip her in—
the daughter crying by her mother—
when you find her stiff in her stall,
you will have to break her legs
so she will fit.
*
When you dig a basement
ten feet deep, push away topsoil
to reach into clay and scrape
the scoop across a boulder.
Send your brother in to measure;
aim the laser, read a quarter-inch
too shallow. Pound the stone,
over and over—buckets are strong,
excavator’s