Walking In The Dark
Specialist appointments don’t wait
for chickens to wake,
so I walk to the coop before dawn
flashlight swinging in time
to the bucket handle’s creak.
Of course I sing to that rhythm,
even if nocturnal creatures
wonder at a shadow
carrying creak and song
with a star in her hand.
Farm Accident
for my father’s cousin, who died this way
Up before dawn since you could dress yourself,
you knew every step of haying, harvesting,
milking, birthing, culling. Knew mortality stomps close
to blades and bits, pulls with a silo’s corn-quick drowning.
Boots, jeans, jacket shape to the body until their ease
is the farmer’s ease, but that day a new jacket,
stiff and stupid, fed your arm into the grain auger.
A chewed-off broom handle says you’d tried to unclog
the machine still running when they found you.
Volunteer firefighters, who knew you for years,
removed an auger tube section to retrieve your arm.
Over casseroles and cream pies at your funeral
people shook their heads, said he farmed his whole life.
You knew that auger well as your wife’s breath.
Grandma, who bought the jacket for you,
took sick that very week, never was the same.
House on Smith Road
Built on a swollen lip of land
where railroad tracks curve out of sight,
the house barely stands.
Behind it, what once was a barn
rests in an exhale of timber.
Battered cars cluster close,
rusty flies drawn to decay.
Painted plywood band-aided
to the side, blue tarp tacked on the roof.
It’s someone’s home.
Every time I drive by
I’m relieved to see light in a window,
laundry flapping defiantly on the line,
faded red plastic flowers
potted on the porch.
No matter what’s done to her,
or undone too long,
this hunched great-grandmother
shelters her family.
One day a sign appears, jaunty colors
out of place in that ragged yard.
Soon, mail no longer bulges
in the bent roadside box.
Cars are towed.
Within weeks
the tarp twists away,
part of the roof caves in,
the porch buckles.
There are people who keep going
past all predictions,
chewed up by cancer
or rattling with emphysema.
They hold things together
for the daughter struggling
with heroin, the spouse
wandering through dementia.
I think of them as this house
slides ever closer to the ground,
plastic flowers still blooming
on that brave tilting porch.
published in Blackbird (Grayson Books, 2019)
Learn more about Laura on the Contributors page.
Laura’s latest collection, Portals (2020), was published by Middle Creek Press and is available here.
(Photo: Tim Vrtiska/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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