Trophies and Other Poems by Allen Braden

Trophies

aaaaAny lost citizen of the wild
wandering our land didn’t live very long.
Most were consumed. A few undressed
to brighten the side of the machine shed.
Nailed in place, their skulls witness
and weather down to the color of salt.
Jawbones like lopsided boomerangs
gnaw the wood whenever the wind blows.

aaaaHere lives our heritage haphazardly
decorating the rough-sawn planks,
our tribute to generations of game
downed by generations of brothers.
From hollowed-out horn, uncured pelts
and the tines of most antler,
a chattery of magpies has cleansed
all morsels of grease and gristle.

aaaaHere lives only a fraction
of the legacy, such customary violence
men hand down to younger men,
nothing here to illustrate the efficiency
of skewering salmon with a pitchfork
or even dynamiting them to the surface,
of plinking a bobcat off a power pole
with a second-hand semi-automatic.

aaaaHere lies that living tradition
etched in the grooves and hollows,
dimples and sockets of skull and bone,
in every fleck of paint and splinter of wood.
Back then, running trap line was a gesture
of love between fathers and sons.
Back then, a kill shot determined
who was the better man.

Enough

Let it burn, burn down to the damned ground.
Let the horses scream inside the barn ablaze,
its timbers popping like gunshots,
the tack and saddles hot cackling
and sparks swarming out into the night.
Let the coyotes, their tails afire, lope along
the edge of this widening ring of light.
As in any dream, you’re a little unsure
where and when the will was spent,
when your old man became an old man,
for now the fields all around are dowsed
as the flames weaken, then dissolve,
and he says he’s had enough of this life.

Remembering Precious Landscape, but with an Elegy in Mind

Nevertheless the front yard, even the hawthorn,
flourished. Various roses built a windbreak,
all the catalpa petals splayed themselves open
and pollen splotched the limbs in gold profusion.

Suppose a woman lived there, a young wife,
her tanned arms dappled from whitewashing,
beautifying the wagon-wheel fence assembled
out of last century’s rumbling west for a better life.

Say years later, while kneeling in her rose and iris bed,
she happened to gaze toward the east forty
and witness the men in her family, at a distance,
circling and swinging their long-handled shovels.

They could’ve been mistaken, a hundred years earlier,
for threshers slapping chaff from the harvest.
They were in fact clubbing a wounded badger,
winnowing its blood into the furrows of stubble.

Now suppose that the iris have grown
wooden, their blues and lavenders blackened.
Razed down to the quick, her roses
promise to return. Prolific. Invasive.

*

Allen’s collection A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood is published by University of Georgia Press and is available here.

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Allen Braden

Allen Braden was the last generation to grow alfalfa, wheat, barley and beef cattle on his family’s farm outside White Swan, Washington on the Yakama Indian Reservation. He has published recently in The Hudson Review, The Gravel Road and Spelt. Braden is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood (University of Georgia) and Elegy in the Passive Voice (University of Alaska/Fairbanks). His writing has received awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a writer's residency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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• Trophies and Other Poems by Allen Braden - August 8, 2024