Nameless Tonight, Not Me, Immensities
In the meantime I explore these old farms
the way a raccoon exploits an abandoned barn,
listening for the torrential wavelengths of snakes
fleeing the rain to hunt mice in the dishevelled bales
of sour hay way past dreaming of mangers.
After the original occupants die
and the last born son has left the farm for good,
we're all strangers in a used solitude.
The indignant silence makes everyone a trespasser.
Names on gravestones. Names carved in barn beams.
A scripture of old curtains hanging from the windows
like the priestcraft of spiders that haven't been disturbed in years.
Prewar magazines espousing the miracles of magnetism
in relieving the agonies of rheumatism
and hairline fractures of cracked vertebrae
that took the load upon themselves out of pride
one too many times without thinking
of their own cornerstones and rotting floor sills.
A roof collapsing. A door on one hinge like a drunk
trying to hold on to something upright and final.
Schools and churches, pews, desks, and woodsheds,
everything as functional as the hives and houseflies
that cluster in the walls like those born to follow
the tried and trued, straight and narrow road
through the winding woods reweaving it
like a loose thread that unravelled the labyrinth
of the spiritual lost and found that dug up their bones
for hygienic reasons that had nothing to do
with how deep they were buried in the land
before their corpses were washed away from the soil
that clung to them like faithful hunting dogs
that slept on their graves for weeks after they died,
not knowing, how the city would come to them,
even in their homegrown deaths, like roadkill and erosion. Salt of the earth with bedrock hearts, I come
like the deus ex machina, as you would have seen me
in terms you could have understood, late in the day
like a ghost to a morality play on tour in the country,
looking for a clearing among the trees to view the stars
long after the applause has died away. And the longer
I stand here surveying six thousand photogenic stars
burning without fire permits in the summer dark,
mourning your exorcism, the more I feel crowded
by your absence as if the Summer Triangle
were missing an eagle and the Seven Sisters
in the orchards of the Pleiades, carried away by the wind,
like Sabine maidens, had pruned the horns of Taurus
by deboning the land of the humans
they've torn out of it like the stumps of the locust trees
that used to sing here at night, bright with blossoming stars
and the occasional night bird like me
on its way to somewhere else,
and in the morning, was backed-up
by the ecstatic choirs of the born again honey-bees.