The First Line Of This Poem Is From An Essay By Marvin Bell
We wake up every day incomplete, leaving our better selves behind. You, across the slats as if we were bundling, only breaking into snowbanks for a little sleep, a small dying. Dream-ravished, dry in the throat as if hoarse from desire, we feel the light just outside us. Inside, it is murky, still. We move wounded, unwinding our hurts into the tangled sheets, groping for our breath under the pillow. The bed is wracked by storms we cannot trace. It is the crust that wakes, streaks the drawn air, burnt edges flaking, finding the cold floor. But where is the rest? These are remains, the particles, last night’s skin shedding under the tap. You search high, I look low, cut off at the numb ends of my grasp, sniffing, clearing my voice for the day to come, vacating what I knew when I was lost to this room, taking inventory of the spare parts.
Tornado
The landscape of my memory has been torn apart, uprooted. The winds came through our farm, our farm alone, the month my mother was going to move; it is a housecleaning, a transplant, a warning to those who do not live with the land but on it. I remember driving up to the house and seeing dark spots in the fields, the cows had got out while the hired man drank. The cows were full of bloat, filled up like pictures in a child’s book. There was nothing to do but do something, my father first, of course, and the rest of us, each with a butcher’s knife plunged into the cows’ bellies, and I pushed on a swollen side, pushed into the cow and the stink came out, the skin became a cow again and stood up, dumbly, dazed and quite dumb about it all. This has stayed in me, like bloat, all these years, nobody to knife me with the needed act, nobody to squash my sides in without having to stop and think about it, which would be too late, letting my tears fall out like a swallowed field. All the trees gone and I still pruning them, drawing strength in their shade.
