Aubade with Elsewhere & All
A boy kneels on a dirt floor & empties
his pockets — two cat’s eye agates,
a railroad spike, jingle of brass
casings levered from his grandfather’s
.22, the smell yet of smoke, faintest
blue of powder stains. He creaks open
the toolbox & where once rested
implements of order and repair, stows
these artifacts of elsewhere & all
that has gone away, stows them
alongside the others — thin bones,
mother-of-pearl river shells, a fluted
glass bottle stamped MILWAUKEE,
the glossed square of a magazine page,
which, unfolded, reveals Kathy Ireland
in a green bikini. With both hands the boy
closes — he nearly trembles — the rust-bitten
lid & from the imaginary satchel
hung over his heart lifts an unfailing
& invisible lock. The treasures within
thus secured, the boy rises & takes
his leave of the homesteader’s shack,
that dank sanctum, which sat slumped
in the far corner of the shelterbelt,
a tangled acre of ash & Russian olive
planted by some dead ancestor to slow
for a moment the insistent plains wind,
which blows now unimpeded, as nothing
remains — not the shack, not a single tree.
Only the lock, the key.
* * * * *
A man steps into the gymnasium for the Saturday night basketball game
& his sinews pull at his bones
as the wind pulls at the cottonwoods —
as the river eats at the bridge’s moorings —
& the bodies of the hunched, hero-dreaming spectators
& the soft, galloping players & the bespectacled referees
are one body, & molecules of herbicide tick
in the alveoli of every blooming lung —
the gravel roads lead tonight away from town,
& the ditches dry down,
& the beeves rip the last bunchgrass down to the roots —
when my grandfather hauls the banker up by his shirtfront
& in a shower of popcorn & red licorice
tosses him down the bleachers, alive
to all that is honorable & wrong in us.
* * * * *
Locust
Nothing came up in the north field.
We haven’t seen rain since April.
The clouds above weigh many tons.
They drift by like sedans on the highway.
My grandfather says there used to be a song like this.
The kind you play on a mouth harp.
Better than a dozen verses.
Half again as many choruses.
No matter how it goes the devil shows up.
He’s like grasshoppers that way.
I keep a glass jar of them on my bedstand.
I like in the night their click & skitter.
I dream a lake as blue as my rifle eye.
If you hook them at the thorax they’ll twitch for hours.
Even with a sinker even at the very bottom.