WHERE DARKNESS FALLS EARLY ON THE FIELDS
A New Cycle of Spoon River Poems
B.J. Omanson
The Prodigal
In the end the thing that disturbed him most,
the thing he remembered most through the years,
was when he returned to the family place,
to the hard unforgiving acres where
his father still farmed, and recalled again
the inherent knowledge he once possessed
simply by being his father's son--
a knowledge foregone, consigned to the past,
till he saw it rise up in his father's face
as a look of reproach: that nothing gained
by talking has worth, that cattle and land
are the only wealth befitting a man,
that a landless man is like Adam cast
from the Garden, shamed, and forever lost.
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Self-published. (Morgantown, WV: Monongahela Books, 2002). First Printing. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. Stiff paper wraps, linen
paper, illustrated with map & decorations by the author, 54 pages.
Narrative and lyrical
poems written over a period of twenty years, portraying the landscape and inhabitants of the
northern Spoon River valley of Stark County, Illinois, where both sides of the author's
family farmed for four and five generations. A number of the poems previously published
in such journals as The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review and Shenandoah.
$25.00
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Last Stand
When he woke in a cloud of pain to find
that he'd been installed in a narrow bed
in a strange room, a part of his mind
returned to the morning he lay half-dead
in the Argonne Forest, awaiting help,
expecting deliverance, counting upon
a fellow Marine ~ but no such hope
supported him now. He was on his own.
He ripped that abomination, that tube
and needle, ripped it out of his vein
and, laying hold of the lamp like a club,
he raised a thunderous shout till a rain
of running feet on linoleum poured
indignantly down the hall to his door.
Like Bowie near death at the Alamo,
propped against pillow with pistol cocked,
the old man waited for faces to show
in the open door and launched his attack,
hurling bedpan, lamp and telephone
at the scrambling nurses. They had him packed
and escorted home within the hour.
That evening, dug in like a cornerstone
on his own farm, resolutely locked
against all reason, lord of his tower,
he defied his family's threats and pleas
till they crow-barred the door and found him dead,
draped in a coat, sitting upright in bed,
a Winchester rifle across his knees.
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Class
was what she hoped for a little more of
but wasn't holding her breath-- it was something
in short supply on the farm and valued
accordingly, like seedcorn or credit--
a thing to be cultivated with care
and hoarded like so many precious jars
of late-summer fruit. Class was a velvet
embroidered chair where the men never sat
in a parlor always dusted-- if only
she'd had a parlor-- so sometimes Class
was only a corner of yard fenced off
from the hogs where, tucked among onions,
she cherished a hidden bed of alyssum.
Class was keeping her six daughters clothed
in handmade dresses, not hand-me-downs,
while strictly admonishing every lapse
of grammar or bearing or common grace.
Class was a lyric by Longfellow learned
as a child and softly recited
(on mornings when all the men were afield)
to a disapproving chorus of hens.
Class was a few stolen moments sitting
alone at the kitchen table, slowly
turning a page in the WARD'S catalogue.
Class was something to do with great cities,
with distances traveled by night, a wordless
prayer in her child's heart and a silvery
horn from an east-bound express suspended
above the fields as she drifted to sleep.
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The Graying Edge of a Winter Evening
In Stark County, in his eighty-third year,
my grandfather died. The tall gabled house
overlooking the creek and bottomland
from a rough oak ridge stands empty now,
but nothing changes. The west-facing pane
of the window-bay where he watched from his desk
again glazes red as sunset crowns
the rim out beyond the timbered slopes
and, again, a raw wind sculpts the snow
into curving drifts across the back yard.
A familiar hour, the graying edge
of a winter evening, when day and night
walk the same bare fields. An ice-refracted
ray of rose imperceptibly moves
among old mementos lying upon
the darkened oak of his desk, igniting
the interior of a glass paperweight
and warming the copper of four old coins.
In a matter of days, we will all convene
for the sorting out and dividing of goods,
the auctioning off of machinery,
of cattle and parceled land, the settling
of last accounts. But for now it's as though
my grandfather's only just left his chair
and wandered off somewhere along the hall
or down the darkened stairs to the cellar.
Nothing has changed. Once more, as in all
the uncounted winter days of his life,
the early dusk haunts the empty house,
the quiet rooms darken, the furnace kicks in.
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Love Among the Graves
Through the whole of an autumn afternoon,
we lay at the foot of a graven
stone
in whose sunken shadow we made our bed ~~
a spray of
nightshade encircled her head
and the play of dappled light on her
cheek
and along her throat made it hard to speak ~~
the fragrant
grass was long and unmown,
her blouse undone and her hair windblown,
and
none but the cold indifferent dead
bore witness to all that was done or said.
And though half the village had damned outright
our renegade love, we
savored our plight
and as outlaw lovers we vowed to stay
till dusk had
obliterated the day ~~
the long hours passed and the last light
waned,
yet still in delirium we remained,
lost in caresses increasingly
bold,
clinging to all we could never hold
until, lying in ruins, at
length, we slept,
as high overhead the cold stars crept.
And when the
last star had died with the dawn,
I awoke to find her utterly gone
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by tracks of her skirt in the silver dew,
by a remnant of ribbon
left as clue,
I traced her to where an old willow bent,
loosening languid
leaves in the current
of Spoon River . . , and there where it wended
deep
into shadow her story ended,
a glimmer of silver arms in the stream
and
halos of floating hair like a dream.
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The Morn of Creation
The unlikelihood of something so white
in the density of midsummer leaves
compelled him to halt his team in midstride
and leave them to stand amid newmown hay
as he went for a closer look.
 His approach,
after decades spent with rifle and rod,
was one of stealth which, on this occasion,
was just as well, for what was revealed
by parting the leaves of the willow-hedge,
was a creature as likely to fly away
at the least of sounds as the shyest doe,
a milky-pale and delicate creature
standing in the shallows of Spoon River,
a sinuous woman beautifully bare
on whose flame-like figure the filtered light
evoked celestial grace.
As he watched,
she raised a ceramic pitcher and poured
a crystalline stream on her upturned face
till her hair was a shimmering rope of gloss
unravelling down the length of her back
and her every silken swelling and vale
was silvered with little runnels and rills.
He remembered a painting that he had seen
in Chicago sometime before the war
at an exhibition of the Old Masters,
a beautiful canvas by Botticelli
before he succumbed to the evil spell
of the zealot Savanarola:
a vision of Venus with unbound hair
in purity rising from pagan seas
on the morn of Creation.
With eyes closed
in a reverie of primordial bliss,
she twisted the river out of her hair
and shivered her raven tresses until
they enfolded her like the fall of night . . .
At that moment one of his Percherons,
standing forgotten in the sunlit field,
impatiently stamped a hoof and whickered,
which caused him to look away to the field
for just an instant and, when he looked back,
the enchanted circle of sun and stream
had plunged into shadow, and she was gone.
And as quick as that a casement had closed
and the golden age he had glimpsed was lost
and there was nothing at all to be done
but to go back into the meadow again
and pick up the reins and return to work.
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There Are Stories
There are stories you know without knowing quite
how it is you know them, stories without
any point to speak of, except the point
of their own peculiar strangeness, stories
as empty of purpose as any abandoned
barn in these barren fields, enduring
against all likelihood or good reason.
One such story took place around here
a lifetime ago. An old couple died--
whether, as may be, by Providence
or simply by luck-- they died, either way,
on the very same day. He died before lunch.
The daughters decided to tell her nothing.
She appeared to take no notice of sharing
her bed with a corpse, except to complain
of his icy feet. She was dead before dark.
And that's all there is to that story.
No one recalls anymore who they were.
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After the Auction
With nothing left but a rented room
in town, after which the county home,
his remaining choice was plain enough:
by dint of grit and a cane, he made
his way up a steep and gullied road
to the wasted oak that crowned the bluff
and there, looking back on what was done,
on his fathers’ acres auctioned off,
he pulled from his belt a loaded gun.
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Nightfall in a Rural Graveyard
A disused knoll between fields, set apart
as burial ground when the first settler died:
some ninety years later a horse-drawn cart
conveyed the last coffin. Now no one knows
of any visitors other than crows ~
the gate is grappled in vine.
This is no
fit place for the living, where weedy rows
of lichen-encrusted slabs recede
in the old and obdurate shade of yews.
There are presences here, not only of those
bewildered and disembodied souls
that cower about their bones like ghouls,
but of something residual, more to do
with the knoll itself, with the grating caw
of crows in the distance, the muted blue
of skies through a barren tree ~ presences
intrinsic as death, indifferent as dust,
that discompose and deter the senses,
instilling a dull unease . . .
All but lost,
the west is like absence: each fencerow ends
on that gray horizon where field and mist
and darkening sky coverge to a blur.
Mourning-doves murmur.
Night impends.
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Epitaph
Concealed under corn, the wreckage of farms,
rotted timbers of buried silos and barns,
the hard rusted shards of harrows and plows,
the fallen-in hollows of cellar and house,
long-buried fragments of saucers and crocks,
doorknobs and buttons amid clay and rocks:
such are the secretive depths of the sea
of corn that extends to eternity
from the banks of Spoon River: beneath the sky,
beneath all we see, generations lie.
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