Cosmos: A Poem

Repairing the Farmhouse

25 REPAIRING THE FARMHOUSE Connecting the family graveyard, once, with the family farmhouse, I faced a gulf of time and loss, that only a thought could carry. I felt my ancestral body pause at the highway— stiff in whispering blades of the head-high corn— admiring the white straight marks of the upper and lower porches’ railings. The pavement held me back, like a boundary in Dante. With no dead poet beside me, I rushed across— seeing the cars either way, small in their distance. The oaks in front of the house stood broken-topped from storms—the chimneys at either end rising mantall above the second-floor roof, but missing bricks in the ornamental finish. Tenants had lived in it, and been abusive or merely careless with its legacy, for half the life of my grandfather. Now, after my father’s death, I was having the tall-paned windows on the further, groundfloor room restored. With siding re-nailed, recaulked, with scraping and painting, money had flowed into this arthritic, stout-beamed structure like water soaking into dry ground. The set-apart kitchen had leaked, used as a store-room, after housing chickens. The peg-joined frame of the main house held stoutly, indifferent to storms, its siding mostly original. In the new panes, with fresh paper stickers, I had missed the ripples of the other, hand-blown glass. I climbed the board steps, crossing the eroded porch, and entered the main room. The view outside, through those windowpanes flawed from the past, distorted the corn-blades and momentarily magnified a hawk, turning tight discs, 26 climbing, above the woods-line of Toisnot Swamp. The walls inside, inscribed by water stains and illegible countries and landscapes of peeledaway wallpaper, puzzled me, like erased blackboards, around a kid who’d missed the class. I imagined those masters, who had built this ship to sail across years, on the waves of furrows: those plowed up and subsiding twice a year, in the ocean of fields. I sighted the graveyardrectangle through a pane of rippled glass, thinking, that glass is a solid fluid, flowing through centuries. These panes had hardly had time to sink down thicker toward the lower edge, as in English cathedrals. I can inherit this place but not know it, I thought, going out into the front porch shadow from which the far headstones of my great-grandfather and his brother and two wives glowed gray-white like the time-soiled tallow of candles in sun. I saw the sweet gum trees over Charlie Sutton’s house in the corner that my father had sold him, to keep him as mechanic in our garage. Those starry, lopsided leaves reflected on a farm pond, its surface inverting the trees, suspending the current of the stream which fed it: as if history were only a picture. ...