63 Home poems

going on everywhere in summer’s cold wind winging through hollies. Banana plants flap like canvas sails above a dugout cellar where Latino boys shoulder cans of dirt, rocks. Three doors down more or less

This prairie holds us with its plainness. An ugly wife. We would not stay but children comfort us and we need this flatness. On our table a carp with a tumor on its lip, larva eating its side. An old man laughs, one silver tooth in his head like a galvanized watertank. We are driven back into the land, our raccoon faces banded around the eyes with motorcycle goggles. Every car we had rusting in the yard. We saddle the buffalo and say we are captives. This barrenness holds us down like a wife.

When I open the door and reach to the light switch the world opens as it did each time. The garlic jar on the ledge, the ceramic cup holding cheese cutters and paring knives. Outside a branch from the ash tree worries the window. It was a place where I knew the drawer pulls, the feel of steps to the basement, the smell of cool cement. If I open the middle cabinet, the linen is there as you left it, well-ordered, none of it fine.

A town so flat a grave's a hill, A dusk the color of beer. A row of schooldesks shadows fill, A row of houses near. A courthouse spreading to its lawn, A bank clock's lingering heat. A gleam of storefronts not quite gone, A courthouse in the street. A different element, almost, A dry creek brimming black. A light to lure the darkness close, A light to keep it back. A time so still a heart's a sound, A moon the color of skin. A pumpjack bowing to the ground, Again, again, again.

Sewn straw, exact pattern. Fields of rice-sprigs evenly set, a mile of herringbone tweed. The town, a sea of gunmetal, fish-scale tiles. By morning each floor a casserole of pillows, coverlets, comforters, towels:    flown nests. Imprint of bodies, fading. They fold the beds away, the room waits empty all day. All day the bodies circle, leaving no impression on each other. Tooled in the foundry of the streets. School-caps, factory-packed subway, miracle train: one territorial imperative, an emperor’s. On his platform one yard square perched on a roof that slopes in waves of tiles up toward other tiled cascades, the karate student for  hours does running in place, deep knee bends on his surfboard perch. All his free time to make his body efficient, tight, exact, rising and falling, mint piston pumping in its shaft.

Popcorn-can cover screwed to the wall over a hole so the cold can’t mouse in

Unreasonable lenses refract the sensitive rabbit holes, mole dwellings and snake climes where twist burrow and sneeze a native species into houses corresponding to hemispheric requests of flatness euphemistically, sentimentally termed prairie. On the earth exerting a willful pressure something like a stethoscope against the breast only permanent. Selective engineering architectural submissiveness and rendering of necessity in regard to height, eschewment of climate exposure, elemental understandings, constructive adjustments to vale and storm historical reconstruction of early earthworks and admiration for later even oriental modelling for a glimpse of baronial burdening we see it in the rafters and the staircase heaviness a surprise yet acting as ballast surely the heavens strike hard on prairies. Regard its hard-mouthed houses with their robust nipples the gossamer hair.

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings, or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms? The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow in all directions, the windowsills swelling with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne through tinted glass above the milled grains? The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs, the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains, and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure— the rote grace of every tempered life?

In the dining room there is a brown fish hanging on the wall who swims along in his frame while we are eating dinner. He swims in candlelight for all to see, as if he has been swimming forever, even in the darkness of the ink before someone thought to draw him and the thin reeds waving in his stream and the clear pebbles strewn upon the sand. No wonder he continues his swimming deep into the night, long after we have blown out the candles and gone upstairs to bed. No wonder I find him in the pale morning light, still swimming, still looking out at me with his one, small, spellbound eye.

The irritations of comfort— I visit as they rebuild the house from within: whitening, straightening, bracing the chimney-breast edges and forcing warmth, dryness and windows with views into the cottage below canal-level. For yes, there’s a canal, bringing cold reflections almost to the door, and beyond it the main line to Manchester, its grid of gantries pale against the upland and the sky; there’s a towpath pub, where the red- haired old landlady brings up the beer from the cellar slowly in a jug: there’s a chapel next door to the cottage, set up with a false front and a real boiler-house, and— rest, my mind—nearby there’s a small haulage contractor’s yard. Everything’s turned up here, except a certain complete cast-iron housefront, preserved and pinned to a blank wall in Ottawa. This comfort beckons. It won’t do. It beckons. Driving steadily through rain in a watertight car with the wipers going. It won’t do. It beckons.