Three Poems by Sydney Lea

My Uncle’s Farm

I recollect particulars by the dozen,
But late in life I yearn
to shift the sensory into some higher realm.
I dream this would make the life whole.

Everything, however, resists translation
from quiddity: whiff of the barn
all year; long shadows of cornstalks, summer receding;
spring pastures pocked by woodchucks;

airborne crystals of frost at dawn; in autumn,
an owl high up in the loft;
the landscape’s dells and hollows, each familiar
to me as any playmate.

All these, all right, but what do they validate?
I could point out even today
which pine in winter refracts the looming moon,
and through which mullioned window

I watched that show, or the sun at dawn exploding
onto days out of school that boded
unpredictable exploits, to which I was roused
by the lively squabble of crows.

I’m still moved by such cues, innumerable and random:
the tang of twisty apples
from half-wild trees, to choose a single example.
That savor in these late years

can hint at some astonishing transformation.
But I say, I tremble, my head spins,
my knees turn wobbly as jelly– platitude
insulting signification.

Archaisms

My younger brother –it would be!–
gave me a confident look, then raised his hand
to the panel of buttons and pushed one
he could reach on tiptoe. That child was bound to die young

and did. It puzzles me now
that Miss Houston’s Dry Goods had an elevator
way back then, not to mention
one with no operator. I was far from worldly,

but even at my age
it was easy to tell Miss Houston was very old-fashioned
by her pince-nez on a chain,
the palsied shake of her head, her shapeless house dress,

and the bun in a net at her nape.
The door opened up and my dauntless brother stepped out.
It slid shut and the world went dark.
We were, I quickly assumed, forever lost.

Human forms without arms
loomed all around us. What sorts of villains could they be?
I made out ghastly cobwebs.
Over and over, in vain, I shrieked for help.

while my brother smirked. I figured
our Grandma had given up all hope right away.
Still I kept yelling until
– a wonder!– I heard Miss Houston whinny, “Where are you?”

I must have been younger than six,
because otherwise I’d surely have known the word cellar.
I could only think to shout back,
“We’re on the last floor!” It seemed the last something, all right.

I’ve been in more threatening places
since then, but that doom– how I felt it! We were rescued of course,
and of course, my brash, doomed brother
for many weeks after kept on mocking my terror.

“Did you ever pick beans with a hard-on?”
This wasn’t a question I’d ever dreamt of hearing.
Just arrived in that north-country hamlet and carless,
I’d been hitchhiking to a new job some miles south.
He didn’t introduce himself, but this
was Dub, grave-digger, lawn-mower, part-time farmer.

Late 1960s, he’d hired a crew
from a hippie commune to help him reap from his truck plot.
“This one little gal,” he explained,
“why, she took her shirt off soon’s we started.”
So the pluperfectly offbeat question he’d asked
made a sort of sense, however crass.

No old-timers like Dub remain in that town,
virtually every farmhouse bought and remodeled
by people indifferent to local lore.
Judge his question however you will.
As for me, I dream of beholding
his beat-up old boat of a Chrysler veer to the shoulder

so I can take a seat up front again.
I’d like to smell him: the dung, the dirt, the pipe.
I’ll never explain such a longing,
maybe not even to myself,
a man you could now call archaic too,
just one thing left to fear, though not very deeply.

What’s Left from the Fire

I’m plagued: I can’t purge the sight
of him in his dooryard, wearing his washed-out pajamas,
shivering, coughing, almost collapsing
from years of his smokes and now this other smoke.
I felt a bit honored, but also unnerved
by his sharing that day with me and his feelings about it
long after the fire that killed their son

became a punishing memory.
We never talked about having more children.
It just never came up.
I can still see her too, standing mute beside him
in the frost-browned grass, wind off the mountain pressing
her nightgown against her breast.
She paid no mind. She didn’t weep out loud

but her eyes in the brutal glare of the blaze
looked like two gemstones. Fact is, he told me,
the moments we could have got together
for kids– they never seemed to come up again.
At first, he ascribed this to grief,
but it wasn’t just that, and in time he knew it.
Our lives were so different. Why would he have such faith in me?

There wasn’t no ugly feelings, he claimed.
Neither blamed their bad fortune on the other.
That was a comfort,
but sure enough, the fire just killed off talk about family.
I remember one strange detail from that day:
the flames had burned away the walls of the ell
though the main house kept on burning.

Then something uncanny: a mourning dove fluttered down
to the woodstove in that steaming ell’s wreckage.
Just another noontime.
The metal simply had to be hot,
but the little bird appeared to pay no attention.
I’ve held that image in mind more clearly, perhaps,
than the fire’s, an abstract wash of orange

I tried and failed, of course, to ignore.
The doctor whom I used to visit in those times
asked me why the dove
should be the foremost thing to stay with me.
I didn’t dodge her. My answer was honest:
I just don’t know. The miracle? She kept on pressing,
the way they do. I had nothing to add.

That session, we’d been considering guilt,
and I told her how my friend would wonder
if his wife did blame him and was only hiding her anger,
no matter she never accused him.
But it was a chimney fire to start, and I’m the one
who’s supposed to tend the stove.
I thought I cleaned the pipe and flue….

He’d recite some version of this, then let his voice trail off.
My doctor asked me why I should share
my friend’s self-blame. Again, I answered: I don’t know.
She huffed. But it’s still an enigma, his confidence in me.
On one day I stopped by, he was cleaning up after his cows,
but he spoke, as if in mid-conversation:
So we just kept going. I’d ought to say that– “we.”

I got so damned het up
at times I didn’t pay her no mind, a woman
which brought that baby into this world.
I thought it was my world, after all.
I can see it now; that’s exactly the way I acted.
This man was brought up, I’m sure, like his father
and fathers before them, not to cry,

but he’d break into tears for the rest of his life.
May God forgive me! I’d hear him blubber.
A lot of times when I told about that fire
I never named her name,
just called her my wife instead of Joan.
She never liked Joanie, he told me, kept trying
to change it back. It never worked.

To the town, she was never just Joan.
She accepted it– like too much else, I swear.
I still don’t know why I felt guilty too.
That pair was buried quite some time ago,
but the man’s voice sounds in my soul to this day–
as I never told that doctor again.
Fact is, I haven’t seen her for years.

Sydney Lea’s latest collection, What Shines, is published by Four Way Books and available here.

Learn more about Sydney on our Contributors’ Page.

(Photo: Kayla Nicole/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)

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Sydney Lea

A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015.He is the author of twenty-five books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen poetry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, 2023). In 2021, he was presented with his home state of Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.