Authors: Devin Johnston
Far-Fetched
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CONTENTS
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From hence the River fetches a large Winding â¦
âBenjamin Martin
Well, Sally Hen, how do you like your home?
A straight run from the east to the west
with hardscrabble fit for a choral dance
and overhead, a walnut tree,
lord of ice and obstacles.
In the morning dark or dusk of an afternoon,
you softly cluck, then settle down
to roost in mercury-vapor light
with spring behind your lids.
At its first true intimations,
you bend on backward knees
to crop a tussock of cloverleaf,
raising a lateen tail above the trough.
Tufted auriculars disregard
horn and drums, mahogany tones
of a tenor deep within the house,
but not the soft chromatic descent
of snowmelt, or a breath of wind.
From a fallow bed, so much undone,
your parched and reptilian cry proclaims
a perfect form of incompletion:
first egg of the year.
Above Ivanhoe and Fries,
blues dissipate the ridge
as rain comes
wrapped in itself.
Pull the curtain so I can sleep.
A colt's tail drags a scuff,
a handbreadth of cloud
skiffing across the gap,
its wake a drow of cold breath,
a mug of dirty light, tipping out
reflections from a daguerreotype,
smur that deepens and deepens,
turning as smoothly as dusk
from mull to rug
bickering on the chimney cowl.
Socked in, you lie awake
inside a steady rustle,
a sound as dull
and absorbing as paper.
The general condition
leaves a thousand tokens,
hissing in the grate,
swamping the clay chimneys
crayfish make in secret hollows,
lifting oil from asphalt
on the road to Poplar Camp,
dripping from the eaves
of Boiling Springs Baptist Church,
rattling down through
long-abandoned lead mines.
Light pursues each instance,
catching what it can.
A frog pond of pewter.
The dull shine of hair.
At the ferry crossing,
broad and shallow,
a chain still glints
beneath the spangled current.
Later, along the ridge,
a few lamps shine
through tent canvas,
the woods around them writhing.
Six hundred feet above the dam at Fries
a stony pasture buckles across the top
and dips toward Austinville.
In a kettle, buzzards
glide at ease
on the river's steam,
up and up
through clockwise turns until
they catch a whiff of rot
and give chase
at a tightrope-walking pace,
no hurry, prey already caught.
Vibrations carry the faintest ring
of metal struck on metal, a cattle bell,
a corrugated pipe
through which a breath
might oscillate and sing,
a rough staccato
bark or yell,
faint as the
chip chip chip
sweet-sweet-sweet sweeter-than-sweet
from a yellow warbler's throat.
An engine flutters, remote,
and the crunch of gravel softens in retreat.
Two horses, hard to bridle, watch the road.
Another sleeps in shade beside a shed,
hock-deep in poison ivy.
Among its vines
bedsprings corrode
and blacksnake
breeds with copperhead.
You seen a river puppy,
down by the waterside?
They got the teeth of chillern
and fur that fire can't burn,
but human reek they can't abide.
As gravel thins, the road becomes a track
that climbs through cloud and sunlight, lead and zinc.
The ruts have overgrown
and cede to scrub,
with no way through or back.
At this remove
a couch and a kitchen sink
have come to rest where thrown
in thick Virginia poke,
far from any route
you'd take in setting out
from Bristol, Boone, or Roanoke.
We took your name from firth and river
that you might go forth and meander
from narrow waters of your birth
across the surface of the earth
and take such windings to and fro,
each scribble unconstrained yet slow,
each stroke and shallow stream of babble
transumptive, metonymical,
the idle tracing of a mood
with purposeless exactitude
that curls now on a backward course
and almost seems to reach the source
but turns away eventually
to join the firth and open sea.
In August, on a hot day,
walk by the Tweed and mark what falls
on the water, in some quiet place,
beneath a bridge, above a bed
of sand or gravell, wherever a Trout
lies boldly gleaming neer the top
and keeps watch for a wrinckle
betwixt him and the skie.
Take a brass-plate winding reele,
and for your line, five horses hayres,
and for your flye, a Cloudie Darke
of wooll clipt from betweene the eares
of sheepe, and whipt about with silk,
his wings of the under mayle of the Mallard,
his head, made black and suitable,
fixed upon a peece of corke
and wrapt so cunningly round the hooke
that nothing could betray the steele
but a hint of poynt and beard.
At no time let your shadow
lye upon the water
or cause a stone to clap on stone.
Be stil, and smoothly draw your flye
to and fro in a kind of daunce
as if it were alive.
He learned to read before the rest of us
and rose to the highest stream by six,
a reedy laugh above the din of voices.
Before dawn, waiting for the bus,
he stooped to pluck a shaggy parasol
and offered it to me, a boutonniere
from the wrong kingdom, a different form of life.
I didn't know him well, you understand.
At fifteen, but for an earthy musk
and army coat, he left the world
and entered a circle of silence.
Survived by delivering pizzas, dealing pot.
Prepared nothing, confiding in no one,
why I never knew, with none to ask.
After twenty years, I could still find him
living here, lodged in his mother's basement,
shooting pool and breathing through his gills,
inhaling the base notes of wet dog,
woolen afghan, and stale tobacco.
Small fears bloom through lethargy
like mushrooms through their universal veils.
Should he emerge from his cul-de-sac
and over Silas Creek, autumnal sunlight
snapping at his face, caught in his lashes,
he might well give a sign of recognition,
tipping a phantom cap sardonically
with the furtive look of a poacher on his rounds.
Beside a richly
rotting oak
a moon fruits forth,
a tender moon
about the size
of a human head,
of the earth
yet nothing like it.
If you pass
this way at dusk,
bring it home
in a paper bag,
light and full
as a thought bubble,
enough, enough
to displace
whatever you had
in mind.
Regret the time
wasted on work
which finds you
even here
but not hachures
of steep ascent
or the unremitting need
for learning facts
and calculating
unresolved events
ripples at the edge
of an ancient sea
Liesegang rings
from water and iron
corrugations
of unclenched surface
graffiti
light as lines
from a graphite pencil
scribbled around
a medallion of lichen
absorbing the sun
Wind and rain
go on eroding
hoodoo from bluff
the mutable form
of horse or mushroom
loaf or anvil
a cloven god
unresolved
and self-absorbed
in slow collapse
back to the clastic bed
and hoof clatter
just beyond
an ice sheet's
leading edge
In a farmhouse at dusk,
a young girl sorts her rocks
and stores them in a cardboard box
where they nestle in tissue paper,
at rest from erosion.
Her fingers, soft as tissue,
lift and turn a geode
(the accident of epochs)
as if it were an egg.