| SILAGE
Selling the farm is not the same as buying the farm.
Buying the farm means you die. Selling the farm
means someone else died. Someone died and left
you it. It's not easy selling a farm. There's the mound of
shit you can't move. The bones of the farm animals
dragged off into the upper pasture. Here's some teeth.
Here's a thigh bone. Here's the pelvis. Big enough
to make a house out of almost. The cows lumbering
across the acreage and the problematic mother
refusing to move. It's like selling something you
can't get your hands on really though it's big and
it smells bad. What to do with the grass silage
fermenting? What to do with the turkey buzzards still
circling that
field where the cows give birth?
What to do with the calf just now coming out
of the cow? The calf lands on the ground in a splash
of bone; flies land on her eyes. On her new mouth.
Nothing you can do about the flies. Meanwhile Mother
is sitting in Father's vacant chair.
She is deciding not to
go anywhere. She doesn't want to sell the farm
though it's not up to her any longer.
So it goes, she says. This is the last calf, brother
says. You take pictures. You stare at that
calf on the ground. How hot the sun is you think.
How still the air. How loud those blackbirds are
in the trees. How big the trees.
--Carol Potter
Copyright © 2012 by Oberlin College. May not
be reproduced without permission.
SCARLATTI SONATA TESTAMENT
Listen . . . all white foxes, all white owls, all snowy
silver geese. Attend . . . all casual fish holding on
in the icy beads of a silver current. Snow leopards,
white bears, silver baboons, mottled white mice nosing
at autumn seeds . . . pause in unison, lift your heads.
Still your wings and heed . . . silvery blue moths fluttering
like flakes of moon. Long-haired, spike-horned goats
on precipitous cliffs, white spiderlings floating
mid-cloud . . . take note and remember. Each barb
of every feather, every black-tipped ivory hair, every
luminous scale and fan-like fin, each knob of spine
and nail, each red drop at the pith of the marrow,
at the root of all glare and mettle, every breath quiver,
every one, every single one, is beheld and declared.
--Pattiann Rogers
Copyright © 2012 by Oberlin College. May not
be reproduced without permission.
EVEN IN PITTSBURGH
Just before we go to bed every night,
the sound of the dog lapping the water
out of his big silver dish in the kitchen
becomes a body hauling itself,
after a long night swimming in the ocean,
onto a strange shore, a shipwreck's sunken
weight behind him somewhere darkly
grinding sand into further dissolves.
I take the black leash from the top
of the refrigerator and clip it to his collar.
We walk down to the end of the block, a lot
abandoned to weeds where he pees
a long thoughtful moment. Tonight's full moon,
earth's old inoculation scar, our constant
Otherwise floods the street. It's a light with weight,
that makes the sound of someone else in the room.
At home, I turn off the lights, knowing
the house all the way through, preferring it
that way sometimes. Turn all the locks.
The dog follows me with a glow-in-the-dark ball
in his mouth. It's like a joke he's been waiting
to spring on me and which I can't figure out
until I hear his tail wagging him up the stairs.
I rub my eyes like a sailor signing a contract.
We strip to skin and fur, climb back into the sails.
--Jeff Oaks
Copyright © 2012 by Oberlin College. May not
be reproduced without permission.
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