David Baker

1. THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch. If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby. All you can eat for a buck at the diner is cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee. Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs in the war and walked with a limp at parade time. Until it burned, the old depot was a disco. A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines. Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge. If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains. 2. GRAVEYARD Heat in the short field and dust scuffed up, glare off the guard-tower glass where the three pickets lean on their guns. The score is one to one. Everybody’s nervous but the inmates, who joke around—they jostle, they hassle the team of boys in trouble and their dads. It’s all in sport. The warden is the ump. The flat bleachers are dotted with guards; no one can recall the last time they got one over the wall. The cons play hard, then lose. And the warden springs for drinks all around— something he calls graveyard, which is five kinds of soda pop poured over ice into each one’s cup, until the cup overflows. 3. COUNCIL MEETING The latest uproar: to allow Wendy’s to build another fast-food burger shack on two acres of wetlands near Raccoon Creek, or to permit the conservationist well-to-do citizenry to keep their green space and thus assure long, unsullied views from their redwood decks, picture windows, and backyards chemically rich as golf greens. The paper’s rife with spats, accusations, pieties both ways. Wendy’s promises flowers, jobs. The citizens want this, too, but want it five miles away where people don’t care about egrets, willows, good views. Oh, it’s going to be a long night: call out for pizza, somebody brew some tea. Then we’ll all stand up for what we believe. 4. CHARMING The remnant industry of a dying town’s itself. Faux charm, flaked paint, innuendo in a nasal twang. Now the hardware store’s got how-to kits to make mushrooms out of plywood for the yard, and the corner grocery’s specialty this week is mango chutney, good with rabbit, duck, or spread for breakfast on a whole-wheat bagel fresh each morning at the small patisserie across the way from the red hotel. Which reminds me. Legend has it that the five chipped divots in the hotel wall—local lime and mortar— are what remains of the town’s last bad man. His fiery death’s renowned, but don’t look now Someone with a camera’s drawing down on you.

It is to Emerson I have turned now, damp February, for he has written of the moral harmony of nature. The key to every man is his thought. But Emerson, half angel, suffers his dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force & delicacy of her soul & the weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th, 1832, of an evening strange with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin. —Emerson looking in, clutching his key. Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing as if stunned by persistent cold wind or leaning over, as from rough breath. I have brought my little one, bundled and gloved, to the lonely place to let her run, hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened along the ground hard from a winter drought. I have come out for the first time in weeks still full of fever, insomnia-fogged, to track her flags of breath where she’s dying to vanish on the hillsides of bramble and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal, one or two sparrows, something with yellow— scatter in small explosions of ice. Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased by the physical crunch of the ground, damp from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot, that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath too rocky to cultivate, covered thick with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled, —that half of him for whom nature was thought. Kate has found things to deepen her horror for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick bramble, or the bramble itself enough to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood- colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa. What does she see when she looks at such things? I do not know what is so wrong with me that my body has erupted, system by system, sick unto itself. I do not know what I have done, nor what she thinks when she turns toward her ill father. How did Emerson behold of his Ellen, un- embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands? Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own natures. Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night with his journal, the awful natural fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been deeper sacrifice than a sacrament. Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down like light snow on the beautiful hills? Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . . —His other half worried by the wording.

If things were worse, this cursed rain would soak me unto sickness, so Samuel Sewall might have written in his vespers journal. I have it on my writing desk inside. For three days I have labored with a saw and plane and many boards to make my girl a swingset near her mother’s lilac shrubs, as rain has drizzled cold and meaningless. How coherent was his world of works and days, when Plentifull Rains might connote a coming providence—so Sewall notes of Her Majesty’s Court, June the eighteenth, seventeen twelve. We are well satisfyed with the Layin out of our Money—

You want more? You want some more of this shit? so he puts his weight to his elbow jammed under the jaw of the other one pinned there, panicked, panting, his back to the bricks. The others are loud and jeering and stand in a jackal circle a spitting-length away. The cold air is full of bird song. The sex—sheer sugar—of the flowering trees turns to powder against the skin, and cakes the sidewalks pale green, and packs the curbs. Far away a powerful siren cries. Someone is about to get his ass kicked. But now the cruel gang spots someone—okay, it’s me—who is writing this whole scene down. It’s so easy to surpass the limits of the powers of description.What are you looking at?

Where do you suppose they’ve gone the bees now that you don’t see them anymore four-winged among flowers     low sparks in the clover even at nightfall are they fanning have they gone another place blued with pollen stuck to their bristles waiting beyond us springdwindle is what we call it collapsing neonicotinoids “high levels in pneu- matic corn exhaust” loss of habitat or disappearing disease in the way of our kind      so to speak what do you think they would call it language older than our ears were they saying it all along even at daybreak —

He is tight at first, stiff, stands there atilt tossing the green fluff tennis ball down the side alley, but soon he’s limber, he’s letting it fly and the black lab lops back each time. These are the true lovers, this dog, this man, and when the dog stops to pee, the old guy hurries him back, then hurls the ball farther away.  Now his mother dodders out, she’s old as the sky, wheeling her green tank with its sweet vein, breath. She tips down the path he’s made for her, grass rippling but trim, soft underfoot, to survey the yard, every inch of it in fine blossom, set-stone, pruned miniature, split rails docked along the front walk, antique watering cans down-spread—up huffs the dog again with his mouthy ball— so flowers seem to spill out, red geraniums, grand blue asters, and something I have no name for, wild elsewhere in our world but here a thing to tend. To call for, and it comes.

All afternoon his tractor pulls a flat wagon with bales to the barn, then back to the waiting chopped field. It trails a feather of smoke. Down the block we bend with the season: shoes to polish for a big game, storm windows to batten or patch. And how like a field is the whole sky now that the maples have shed their leaves, too. It makes us believers—stationed in groups, leaning on rakes, looking into space. We rub blisters over billows of leaf smoke. Or stand alone, bagging gold for the cold days to come.

1. Language must suffice. Years ago, under a sweet June sky stung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, a beautiful woman nearly killed me. Listen, she said, and turned her lovely face to the stars, the wild sky.... 2. No. No: years ago, under a sweet, June sky strung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, under this sky broad, bright, all rung around with rustling elders—or intoxicating willows, or oaks, I forget— under this sky, a beautiful woman killed me, nearly. I say beautiful. You had to see her. Listen, she said, and turned a lovely shell of her ear to the swirl of stars and the moon smudged as a wingtip in one tree, not far. 3. Yes: she scraped my back bloody against a rough trunk. Yes: she flung back her lovely face and her hair, holding me down, and the tree shook slowly, as in a mild, persistent laugh or wind, and the moon high in that black tree swung to and fro ... there were millions of stars up where she stared past us, and one moon, I think. 4. Excuse me. My friend, who loves poetry truly, says too much nature taints my work. Yes. Yes. Yes. Too many birds, stars— too much rain, too much grass— so many wild, bowing limbs howling or groaning into the natural night ... and he might be right. Even here. That is, if tree were a tree. That is, if star or moon or even beautiful woman craning the shell of her ear were what they were. They are, I think, not. No: and a poem about nature contains anything but. 5. When they descended to us, they were a cloud of stars sweeping lightly. They sang to us urgently about our lives, they touched us with a hundred thousand hair-soft, small legs— and held down by such hungers, we let them cover us, this beautiful woman, this me, who couldn’t move, who were stung—do you hear?— who were stung again, were covered that quickly, crying to each other to fly away! 6. ... I just can’t erase the exquisite, weeping language of the wasps, nor her face in starlight and so tranquil under that false, papery, bobbing moon just minutes before, saying listen, listen, nor then the weight of her whole natural body pinning down mine until we both cried out for fear, and pain, and still couldn’t move. 7. Language must suffice. First, it doesn’t. Then, of course, it does.Listen, listen. What do you hear? This nearly killed me. I’ll never know why she didn’t just whisper Here they come, warn Move! cry They’ll kill us! Yes:I will save you ... Yes:I love you too much to watch you suffer! But it’s all I recall, or now need. And, anyway, I loved her, she was so beautiful. And that is what I have had to say before it’s too late, before they have killed me, before they have killed you, too, or before we have all become something else entirely, which is to say before we are only language.

Up the dog bounds to the window, baying like a basset his doleful, tearing sounds from the belly, as if mourning a dead king, and now he’s howling like a beagle – yips, brays, gagging growls – and scratching the sill paintless, that’s how much he’s missed you, the two of you, both of you, mother and daughter, my wife and child. All week he’s curled at my feet, warming himself and me watching more TV, or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow, who like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup maniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose smearing the panes, having heard another car like yours taking its grinding turn down our block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk, that’s how much he’s missed you, good dog, companion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog I told you once and for all we should never get.

For Stanley Plumly Then the breakers turning back to brightness, if the light’s opaque ocean-blue sameness in the sky can be said to break, the way the waves themselves, blue in back of blue like a color in the eye, fall back to the wall — sea wrack, driftwood, or the inner optic shelf behind the lens. Then the gulls and simple cirrus strands turn back to light. Then to inland sparrows, drifting under blue Ohio’s sky — it’s a work day and the heat is the heat of the color of your clothes, wash day, and hands hurt from the swinging of a scythe. Then it’s day into night at the heart of the seeds that fell from your hands breaking open, strewn in rows like water along the ancient seabed floor of the farm. Someone is standing at the door. Someone is waving from the car. This day and that one sinking to brightness and the blue evening wall before that, and a seed that fell from a star becoming, as you will say, one day, all we will become.