Gravel and Hawk: Poems

Receding into Darkness

37 Receding into Darkness 1. Storeroom Follow Granny out, into this gray-aired mausoleum off the back porch. Some swatch of figured cloth is needed for a quilt, some antique button sewn into service, lost thread refound. Breathe talc and camphor in this defunct smokehouse hauled in on a hay truck, rinsed out with a hose, whitewashed so that an old man, installed, could sit sipping sour mash and swallow his last few gallons of air. Your great-grandfather, long dead. Now this. Hold your nose and look past the racks of old clothes, the cedar chests and trunks, for bloodstains, bits of dried fur or hooves of dead mammals. Gristle and bone. Charred wood and sweat. She’s found it now, so turn out that light and close the door. You have to kindly slam it. Slam it harder. There. 38 Now let the dust motes stir and fall and settle back in place. Watch out for the cats flushed out under the floor. They’re wild, live on scraps, keep down mice and rats. Twenty-two, last time counted. 39 2. Storm Cellar More like a crypt, a heap, or hummock, grassy shoulder in the backyard beside the pasture. Mullioned doors and a carpentered cornice. Built, you’d think, for dwarves. Brick steps descending into gloom, floor hoodooed with a scatter of seed potatoes, walls hung with bulbs bulging burlap sacks. Onion fumes. Perfect enticer I never once went in. Too scared. But stood often on the lip and stared into the vent, felt the soft chill of earth’s breath against my cheek, smelled her mushroom dank. And begged God I’d never ride the warped-board bench with daylight glowing green and static electricity sparking through the cracks. 40 3. Sleeping Porch In this unhallowed hall of country music— bullfrogs, crickets, cows shifting quietly under arching oaks, and a single tabletop fan whispering over the three children who sleep and over the one who lies awake studying how the two catalpas cast black shadows that shelve on the grass, the cotton plants doze like soldiers in their ranks, and the vapor lamp reigns over a bugshot kingdom— there comes, at last, a car. At first a far-off sound like water over a dam, then, beneath the wash of tires, the base note of its engine, the headlights feeling forward, scoping furrows as if counting the ribs of his grandfather’s farm. Then the dark capsule itself, 41 a sled, a coal barge contained between pairs of glowing embers, white, red. Then the rush of its wake, its lissome glide as it gently tilts with the road, the hush of it after it goes. Then the lingering thought of it, the replay of its sound and image for several semiconscious minutes. Then the over-warm surprise of butter sunlight filtered through the sagging screens. ...