I walk beneath a sky full of holes, among brittle stalks in the field, trees raining leaves like tongues of fire. Praise in minor keys rises from the plains, my home in wind, each face, each eave, a new octave. The twinkling distant farmhouse flickers life in the night when the ransacking bandit plunders cat food, when the feral dog drags my hen home to her ravenous pups, night owls call, respond. A wandering stream scores the pasture in ragged hoof-print hieroglyphics. Shadows loom in the gloaming, true trunk of pear, arthritic magnolia, dry-eyed susans, shrunken bodies of clover, milkweed, thistle. The huffing wind seals rain beneath a crisp skin of ice sends chickens burrowing into their deep down. I stumble upon the altar of an ancient steel plow left last century, in the wood where it collapsed, returning bit by rusty bit to its beginning. cruel mercy, unrelenting, amen & again.
up on the old highway near the curve that veers south at the top of a hill sits a farmhouse where a widower lives next to a graveyard back off the road behind a wooden gate, a gate that swings wide on a hinge, through which a pasture rolls towards listing granite markers gathered at the end of wheel ruts harbored beneath the oaks. along that worn path an ancient tree drapes weary arms low branches spread wide, heavy on the ground, next to the graveyard where a widower lives among barns & bins chock with plows, combines, tools to plant and harvest each year’s crop, to husband a small herd of cattle penned out back, behind wire panels, steel tube gates bought from the guy who canvases these parts in summer, his large flatbed truck piled with red steel, all sizes, peddled to farmers because buying a gate off a guy is easier than hauling one from town. through his gate the farmer drives a row-crop with a 3-point hitch to impale round bales of clover and prairie grass planted, mowed raked and baled from the pasture that fronts the graveyard with the closed white gate out by the road, the road that curves at the top of the hill where an old widower makes his life wife and kids now gone (Olathe, Atlanta, Raleigh, the grave). the hay is for a feedlot full of cattle, stuck in January mud, heavy heifers, girls he calls them, with their yearlings, who’ve trampled the hay, shat indiscriminately, piss brewing a rain and snow-soup muck the cows don’t seem to mind. the farmer hauls another ton of hay to the lot where the girls ruminate, circle cud over flat wide teeth, process of process and elimination, spoiling their food as they ruin each bale and the farmer heaves another onto the growing pile of excrement and mud in the middle of a lot behind an old farmhouse in the dead of winter where a low white sky hovers over fallow fields stretches to horizon, under a gray sun, that makes no heat. I pass the farmhouse where cows stand like cutouts jammed in mud, one lone steer from last spring’s calving stands atop the waste mountain head and shoulders above the others, unchallenged, still-life, as if snapshot, as if having just arrived the moment I drive again past the old farmhouse up on the highway, near the pasture that fronts an old graveyard where etched in listing tombstones are the names of nobody I know.
the song of the wood thrush trilling hidden among the trees, falls silent season’s last clutch of swallows & phoebes fledges indistinct into the blue. spring’s last blossom falls spent. earth leans into its slow aft tilt, sun slipping low off her shoulder. milkweed, goldenrod, nodding onion huff their slow exhale. the last monarch unfurls her wings uplifted as arms, flutters, disappears. one last sip before hummingbirds wing it south. purple harvest moon spills lamplight down the long gravel road, shimmering over an ocean of grain to here where you remain only leaving on your mind.
Cyn Kitchen is an associate professor of English at Knox College where she teaches creative writing and literature. She is the author of Ten Tongues, a collection of short stories. She also writes poems and nonfiction, some of which appear in Fourth River, Poetry South, American Writers Review, and Poetry Quarterly. Cyn makes her home in Forgottonia, a downstate region on the Illinois prairie.
Stills from Sunset Boulevard, 1950, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Director of Photography: John F. Seitz. Production Design: Hans Dreier & John Meehan. Costume Design: Edith Head
