Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

For Tityrus

A N D R E W G R A C E For Tityrus who had to, as we do now, watch the neighbors leave, us from our porch facing Route 45, pollen drifting like smithereens from some erupted star over the truck of a family whose few hundred acres were taken not grandly by droves of Octavian’s godless soldiers fresh from civil war, but by simple hard luck, rootworm and corn borer, too few loans to afford an acrid cascade of insecticide dropped from those planes whose tracers make the mock-girding which fails each night to prop up the sky. Tityrus, who purchased in Rome from Octavian himself the right to continue to graze his flock in the dropped-apple reek of fall between the stunted row of tamarisks and the rock outcrop that marked his land—if he were here I could ask what advice to give as they come up the drive to return the twenty yards of electric fence borrowed to keep raccoons from their pumpkins, what to say to this family whose three fields we will soon try to buy at the lowest negotiable price, so that it won’t be our furniture someday sticking out the back of a flatbed. Tityrus, who offered his neighbor one last night in Arcadia, clover for his sheep, chestnuts and cheese for his journey, did more The 2000s ❚ 259 than we are willing to. It would take more than generosity or condolence to stop this father’s belief he’s been cheated by those humid nights spent awake urging on the mass of bats constellating above their corn, feeding on that which fled from our well-sprayed land onto theirs, wrecking the yield. If Tityrus were standing here with us, watching their exhaust rise, I would ask him if I should take it as a sign that our farm is the last one in the county with its original name, Shadeland, as night falls and my mind latches on only to that which is giving itself over to bare and continuous forces— the unbeautiful pears fallen at tree’s roots, evening wind’s far-off baying, the chipped and gap-bricked mouth of a well that with each freeze and thaw feeds on itself, increments of stone humming beyond earshot into nothing, which is quick, and final. 260 ❚ The 2000s ...