Am meisten gelesen ▸
Dave Bonta
Sunrise, & the wren’s song bubbles
up from his feet. He dances on the wall
as the ridge turns crimson. Watching from
the window, I feel the heaviness in my chest
lifting like a field stone flipped by the plow,
turning its unmarked cheek toward the harrow.
This world was never a text. With the spring
plowing, arrowheads swim to the surface
of the field adjoining the large sinkhole
down in the valley where an underground stream
briefly exposes itself to view. You can follow it
back under the bedrock in growing darkness,
hunching farther & farther over until you’re down
on all fours & the water meets the ceiling
with a final gurgle. I think of this whenever
the sky in a poem shivers under the knife
among the thin
business of the corn
a chimney where
there was a home
a bed
of asparagus
an absence of red in the war
is a white lie
thin as corn
the bodies of the poor
For hours now the grownups had kept at it:
a scarcely modulated piano roll of talk
as steady as an all-day rain. At last
we bolted out the back where
the corn came almost to the door,
the tassels shining like epaulets
in the late afternoon sun.
We bushwhacked through the knobby-
kneed ranks, crouched in weedless furrows
to burst from cover with rebel yells
& Hollywood whoops of the wounded
until someone let loose with
a scream that sounded too real–
Vultures! Barely missing us
as they sailed out from a ragged
knot of trees we hadn’t counted on:
to see how everybody
turns like the green
blind corn
while we clamber
among the trees
losing ourselves
in a small room
all bewildered
seeing how
they are there
without knowing almost
what to do but have
the outside killed
and ready up beds
in the same room
Right at dusk, as always,
I overhear myself: a drone note
audible in the lull
between shifts of crickets.
Darkness rises from the ground
between the corn stalks,
which are anything but still.
I step deliberately, one season
on each foot. Today left a crust
of salt around my collar,
lifted now by a passing breath
of wings. I don’t look up.
Four quick cries & a pause,
then two more: Estiquirín.
The hoe handle digs
a furrow in my shoulder
To China by ship
we make the globe pay.
Returned to my corn,
I knock six times
upon the ground.
I went to the well to see
the king touch people
for the king’s evil.
The poor people stand
all morning in the rain,
the wind in the corn
changing all remembrance
into country.
who ever had less
than the same innocence
as the wise?
she keeps house
where the day rooms
out in the bare-legged corn
corn is ripe somewhere.
a warehouse of scarecrows?
soup after prayers.
walks between the beds
critical of eye, noting the way the leaves
of corn have curled upon themselves,
rattling in hardly any breeze at all.
They'd like to make believe it's Autumn now,
would they? Playing at getting past the part
where seed heads form, waving their silky hair,
and then depart, leaving the leaves bereft
of any purpose but to leave this world --
except, of course, they don't: that is the gift
of mulch. She brings the hose and couples to
its end a yellow whirligig, made to sing
the holy song of water to the leaves.
Today, green fullness. Tomorrow, living grain.
Sometimes I wake up and feel Nebraska,
the whole state sleeping hip-side on my sternum.
I feel the endless roads parting the flood of corn
after a harvest. I rise in line
with the straight standing ghosts, feeling
fellowship alongside their dry family. We are
split ends of the dirt, empty of duty and purpose.
I have no greeting for this day. I have nothing to say
to the sad souls of my friends that are stretched
so far that the tension is almost shouting
fill me, fill me
How can this state be so long? So, nothing
But somehow that nothing is just sadness
you can't name, a Grassman rumored-beast
that passes barely through the edge of a photograph
yet can draw everything into its shadowy stride.