The farmer met the wife when they were both
already old by some measures, plumb
as the lines of fence coming together.
They turned back and became strangers,
condescended to the world and used words,
no longer accepting there were things
about each other they could never know.
I was born here, she said
& he touches it, reaching down.
The mountains are a sanctuary and the illusion of sanctuary.
One might become one there,
as Little Brushy is, as joy is one that feeds the cattle
and courses snowy into milk.
A deer does not surrender to a certain kind of life
but Amyntas wades the creek against the river,
the idea & slip. Harness and stall of the domestic.
The farm family made a home comfortable enough
to become strange in, framed by frost.
The people twist kleenex and trundle toward each other laughing.
We were taught to draw snow at school, she says.
We were taught to draw upon it.
* * * * *
ELEVEN
The dumb respect of mud daubers for solitude
trumps porch and colony. They leave
their tubes at night, provisioned with paralyzed spiders,
to sleep in the air. In the room of air.
First one has to become spacious enough
lying on the grass, for the grass to roll out in.
Plank of the body broad
inside the narrow nest spit laboriously
into place and crawled out of.
• • •
In the brush, spiders go on spinning the forest
new dogstar webs,
waiting the way parts of the self wait to break
in a way that enters into.
If the air were less direct
with the crashing waves of birds,
the creatures would misunderstand
the euphoric instruments.
* * * * *
TWELVE
A fine thread of rain steams the crumpled towel
of earth. In the fields cattle stand pulling grass
& nothing operates the concept of reality.
Is there any birth, any other splendor
than…the going on / the loneliness.
The good life, in principle, is a current one rides into,
disintegrating.
Song curries the horses in a trade Amyntas answered.
They ride together, two paints taking the hills
behind them step by step,
the proper order too small for their reasons.
She was following him at the moment.
Dialog turning over a question they had nursed.
~ Amy Wright’s chapbook, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, was just released from Apostrophe Press. Previous publications include American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and Grist. She is the Prose Editor of Zone 3 magazine and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.
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