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  • Johnson's Ground, and: St. Paul
  • Jesse Graves (bio)

Johnson's Ground

We sit under the awning and watch them descend in unison.A flock of thirty or more down through the heavy rainWe weren't supposed to get, pecking where grass is thinFor what the moisture turns up.            They look like the sound of the wordGrackle, these scavengers with wings muted black as painted iron rails,As wet tar, their empty beaks flashing a bright citrus smear.Memorial Day weekend and the weather drives us for cover,Beating down plastic flowers and darkening the family gravestones.

Each year we arrive, like any family, to admire new babiesAnd find out who has changed jobs or gotten married.I come to see who's left to sit in the shaded chairsWhere my grandmother sat with her oldest sister MinnieFor the last time, neither of them able to name the other,And both staring as if into a clouded mirror.            In the memory of their facesI see pillars of stone, pillars of stippled salt,Where the hammer of time drives the chisel of living,The opaque blue of their eyes, each pair reflecting the other,Sky blue buttons threaded through a dark blue dress.

Homecoming at the cemetery: they never let us go, even the onesLaid under before our births continue to make their claims,To draw the interest on their spent lives.            My grandfather waits here,A Houston buried in Johnson ground—such is the appointmentHe made with them. He was dead two years beforeI was born, but who do I remind the old people of?Whose picture did I stare into above the living room fireplace?

My great-uncle Gene tells my father and me about the baseHe served in Korea, how bombs sounded hitting the village, [End Page 6] While a hundred feet away is my cousin Gary,Killed in Vietnam, telling his story into our other ears,Into the soles of our shoes.            The foraging birds drag wormsOut of the ground; we pull dark meat from the bonesOf chicken thighs and split boiled potatoes with plastic forks.

Damp air hums in our lungs and old people beginCovering dishes—the rain always seeps in,Even under shelter.            I offer my hands one more time,To the company who packs their leftovers and drives away,And to the company who stays behind, under the tall grass,Left in the restless turning of what we remember of them.

St. Paul

"How cold you think it is out there?" Gerald asked,and I said that I couldn't tell, pretty cold, I guessed.The fog my breath made on the side windowtold me all I wanted to know about the temperature.We drove north on Highway 61 past Hannibal, Missouri,when the rain we had trailed since western Kentuckystarted to clink on the windshield.The sky darkened gradually and soonthe range of the headlights was as far as I could see.The raindrops suddenly thickened in the lightand my throat felt a little tighter.

Our Kris Kristofferson tape jammed the third timethrough "Sunday Morning Coming Down"and wouldn't play or eject from the 8-track player, [End Page 7] so Gerald started telling me about his run-inwith an army lieutenant when he was stationedin Okinawa and danced with the wrong mama-san.But as the snow became undeniable,the story trailed off before any real action,and then for a while the only sound was the suckof breath through his unfiltered Camels.I had heard about the lieutenant before, how hegrabbed Gerald's nose and twisted him to the ground,that his face had never felt the same after that.

We had three hundred crates of navel oranges and tangerinesin the trailer and had stopped for nothing but diesel fuelsince we left Clearwater, Florida, yesterday at noon.We were due in St. Paul, Minnesota, at ten o'clock in the morning.

Gerald had been on the road for eleven days,stopping at home once to wash his clothesand pick me up for the rest...

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