Auction of the Bonded

Perched on the edge of Kentucky,

Crescent’s grown handsome: dark hair,

spit-bug-green eyes, an ache

in wrist and eyeteeth

no axe swinging can slake.

Sowing a taste for leaving,

the whistling hiss

of his own scythe severing

his father’s sparse crop

turns him inside out.

A pocket that aches to be filled.

Crescent presses his

ear to the feathery rub

of a rough-split door,

as they agree

to sell the trading post,

parcel the land four ways

and bond him into trade.

After November’s auction

of the indentured poor,

Crescent walks to a bench

and signs papers

with a surveyor

up the National Road.

On the river ride home,

he fixes his eyes high—

palisades of bird’s-eye limestone

stacked like dusty bolts

of hazelnut homespun on a shelf.

He walks off wearing new boots

for the first time in his life,

shocked at their chafing straightness.

Strange to bend a hard thing

with his body’s will

and not the other way around;

they wear his flesh

to blood and pus

before he’s crossed into Ohio

just the same.