Season

Dead on arrival at twenty-one—

                                                   his memory not the crash

but freezing lost in the woods

                                                finding a trapper’s cabin—

fire roars in the grate but

                                        no one’s home—red fox pelt by

the hearth—

                    soft, deflated length of the animal stretched

across stones

with its lost eyes watching.

~

Drought pasture and no hay—

                                                they deerpath the ridge at night—

the pinto, her coat gerrymandered

                                                       into districts of milk and rust—

the yearling stallion soot-dark

                                               and raw in his architecture—

the mule (who we spot first)

                                             swishing, in a crush of the neighbors’

cabbage, his blonde tail—

                                        bucket of oats to shake them out, then

vault onto grainsacks to keep them at a trot

                                                                      as we drive—they pull

up to graze in a thin scar of clover

                                                      down from the pasture gate—

green strings of slobber blow forth from the worm-work of

the mule’s lower lip—

                                 they won’t come further—I’m ten and follow

directions real good—I run up and swing

                                                                out the pasture gate—

plan is, I’ll turn them when they come—

                                                              where’s a switch to shoo

them with, but my father’s already swatted the stallion’s hocks

and barks the clutch to juice

                                             the mare and mule bucking to bolt—

muscular galloping panic—

                                          the stallion thrashes his head—ripping

reins from the hands of an invisible rider—

                                                                   I raise my arms wide—

barrier or martyr—

                             the stallion’s mane rises away from its crest—

surge of dark strands like particle physics—

~

Outside, a failing tobacco barn—

                                                   inside, twelve rows of wooden

bleachers around a clay pit

                                           where men take bets on which bird

will kill the other first—

                                    I’m five years old—it is freezing—cold

toes sting in their grubby boots—

                                                     men drink from steel flasks

near a potbellied stove

                                     across the barn—my dad said to sit

right here and don’t move—

I think that was a long time ago.

~

~

He rested his head on the pelt by the hearth

                                                                       and felt an unreal warmth—

not on his cold skin but in his chest—

                                                          then the sense that once, long ago,

he’d wandered from the woods to this bare room.

                                                                               He knew if he slept

he would not wake.

~

~

~

During the depression

                                   the old folks couldn’t wait to castrate something

so they could roll the balls in meal

                                                     and fry them in a skillet popping

with lard and tear famished

                                            at the elastic knit of vesicles—They’d call

them mountain oysters, my father related.

                                                                  Often, thereafter, I felt

on my person the weight of some eye watching—

                                                                              eye of some forgotten

ancestor in a flour sack dress scrambling

                                                                in a junk shack’s clatterment

to scan through the warped boards

                                                        as I passed—her wasp-nest tongue

searching over the toothless comb

                                                       of her gums as her spectral eye—

eye that I could almost catch looking

                                                          if I whipped around fast—

sized me up.

~

Rub of shut fists cold against his eyes—

                                                               my father sits up

in the cabin—faint pulse wicks

                                                on the gurney in the hospital—

my uncle finds him—unsalvageable

                                                       body shoved behind

a curtain until the doctor could correct

                                                            the time stamp

on death’s paperwork—

                                      he wipes the blackened face he cannot

recognize, he guesses blood

                                             from the smashed head is clotting

in my father’s throat—past

                                           the broken jaw a forced finger

loosens what was blocking the breath—

                                                               what if the story cannot

escape the throat—

if no one comes to clear the passage?

~

~

The army found fault with his feet—

                                                        instead of Overlord, flat foot

to the floor of a Ford loaded with moonshine—

                                                                         dust boiling so thick

pursuit was impossible—

                                       even when they caught him, car crunched

against rock, the evidence was in flames—

                                                                   that night, on a shelf

in a trapper’s cabin, ink wicked

                                                 behind the binding of this book.

When, in an ice storm after a botched hunt,

                                                                     he told me how he died,

my father mimicked my uncle

                                             mimicking the shock on a nurse’s

face as she saw the dead man

                                                 gasp and cough beside a metal pan

where dark blood had thickened

into clots—my first words.

~