It’s Hard To Forget
It’s hard to forget what I ate when the waters receded:
certain earths, ashes, limestone, cornstalks. Frayed fabric picked faintly away
as if by mice. June bugs. Mice. I craved friable china clay
from a vein in the pond’s berm—ate that, and took duck eggs
to sell in town, though more and more the ducks bore pale shell-less eggs
encased in translucent membrane; those I tore open, cooked outdoors in a bone-handled coffee can. Disaster’s stratum
marked the abandoned kitchen’s clapboard walls and slat-backed chairs: where flooding
had paused for a moment (as if waiting in an orderly way
water has never once done) then moved on. Hemline ravel threaded to a fine thorn,
I gathered false mending, stitched gold filigree
beneath the fabric folds of a jacket in case one day it came to me to leave
suddenly. Already half the county had scattered—reedy gullies
gathered left-behind bedrolls, the debris
of mementos too heavy to carry flecking the fields—but thieves had emptied every barn
of its turning forks and hay-hooks, heavier still. Inside mine, the sun canted
against an aging ox-drawn plough, daybreak sundial
for wanderers to this place inhabited by wreckage, the packed-dirt floor
specked with bones. Untouched by turmoil,
a pistol lay dissected on the workbench, its interior coils
unsprung, musculature retained in its minute landscape even still.
