Watching the Combines and Other Poems by Daril Bentley

Darkroom

The past would seem to exist beneath a red light
behind a door seldom opened
save to revisit photographs hung unclaimed
aaaaaaaaon a drying line in the long, narrow

darkroom of the mind.
Comically out of fashion and curled and yellowed,
the images might or might not make their way
aaaaaaaainto an album like one of those

in an attic gathering dust.
Flip to one of its pages—note the transparent tape
upper left; thumb smudge lower right.
aaaaaaaaFaces go unnamed

for anything poignant left to say
to a dead friend or estranged lover. Were we once
open-eyed?
Were we ever brave? Were we just?

Who framed the picture around that mouth agape?
What had been had the camera panned
to catch some other triumph
aaaaaaaaor failure or neutral, everyday still-life?

Close the door. Close
the light and the album cover. Stand
with that old doorknob in your hand another thirty
aaaaaaaawinters before you go back in.

Watching the Combines

These beasts are cutting down an ordered corn
with mechanized maws
of ponderous pointed teeth—

As in blitzkrieg of war.
They leave behind necessity’s severed limbs
in regular rows beneath

Fallow February’s callous snow.
These others take our boys, our girls, ours
(all the vigor and vintage of the lives we know)

from autumn’s awesome field—
such collective-commissioned penal powers
as grow and harvest laws

that cull our innocent agrarian Janes and Jims
and pretend to us they know what for.
They leave behind to the yield

in a cratered landscape of devastated years
the notice that frees the flow of survivors’ tears
for absent arms and babies never born.

Wish for a City

Landscape of coke-grade cinders
and base-metal scaffolding,
of concrete
and macadam;
of dark-street steps
with foul steps following—
what should I do with you,

so foreign to my former life?
City of black-glass canyon walls,
I want to pave you in clover.
I want to build
corn cribs on your
vacant-lot corners.
I want you to abide by

canning-jar honor as you obtain
cucumbers
and squash and tomatoes
and green onions
from a sidewalk stand.
Behind your opaque windows
that invite

the sunlight and that mirror now
this half-moon,
I want you to feel
the trust in a front door
and the key
that everyone knows is hidden in
the geranium pot.

Daril’s latest collection, The Box, was published by Outskirts Press in 2021 and is available here.

Learn more about Daril on our Contributors’ Page.

(Photo: Vincent Parsons/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)

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Daril Bentley

Daril Bentley is author of several books of poetry and numerous poems published in journals in the U.S. and abroad. He has been a semifinalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a finalist for the New Mexico Book Award for Poetry, and recipient of an Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest International Book Award. He is also a Black Mountain Press "The 64 Best Poets" Series author. A bird conservationist, he makes his home in Elmira, NY.