WHERE DARKNESS FALLS
EARLY ON THE FIELDS
Part Four
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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 ~~
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 Apostasy of Caleb Cobb
From the day the Baptist preacher got caught
consoling the knee of the deacon’s wife,
Caleb Cobb announced he wouldn’t set foot
in any church again to save his life.
He called it a matter of principle.
Sarah, his wife, concerned for his soul,
was not in the market: “Caleb, you’d use
any old thing as a lame excuse:
there’s more principle in those thieving crows
that pillage my pies!” Caleb looked morose.
In the end what it boiled down to was that
Caleb didn’t care to be shouted at,
not if he couldn’t at least shout back,
for Caleb had not acquired the knack
of taking chastisement with Christian grace:
the sight of a sanctimonious face
haranging at him from on high was more
than Caleb felt called upon to endure.
Sarah spoke gravely of the sin of pride.
Caleb’s jaw turned to granite. Sarah cried
(to little effect), then issued a flat
ultimatum. Caleb put on his hat
and, struggling to master a slow burn,
strode in stormy silence out to the barn.
Sarah remained resolute on the porch
and watched him go. She went off to church
alone and unattended that Sabbath morn.
Caleb for his part cultivated corn.
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Proprietress of the Party Line
It wasn’t so much that she listened in
on our every call, it was that she took
not the slightest trouble to mask the din
and clatter of pots and pans as she cooked,
or bothered to set the receiver down
as she bellowed out the door to her boys
or cursed a pig off the porch. All the town
had to talk above or around the noise
of Lucinda’s chaotic life, and yet,
we’d not have embarrassed her on a bet
by letting her know we knew she was there ~
the dullness and drill of her daily fare
had left her, like most of us, deadly bored;
whenever she blew off steam, we just paused
and held our tongues till the turmoil passed:
we wouldn’t want her to miss a word.
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The Harvest
Toward evening they found him out in the field
behind the tractor, lying face down.
The husking-bed of the cornpicker held
a mangled glove, but no blood or bone.
His hand was intact.
 They puzzled it out.
Something, most likely a stalk, had jammed
the snapping rolls. As he freed them, they caught
a finger, ripped the glove from his hand,
and gave him so unexpected a shock
he dropped on the spot from a heart-attack.
They laid him out in the bed of the truck
and ferried him home.
As they neared the yard,
she stepped from the doorway, twisting a lock
of hair round her finger, staring hard.
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Hanging out the Wash
in the Midst of Fall Plowing
The sight of billowing sheets in the wind
caused something to break in the little child,
not only because, like anything wild,
they wrangled and whipped but because their fall
and lift afforded glimpses of all
the impending darkness that lay beyond:
the sinister acres of cloven land,
the miles of merciless black without end.
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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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The Exile
On the winter morning that they were wed,
she made of her husband a sole request:
that before old age should overtake them,
habits harden and joints be possessed
by infirmity, they would move to town.
The thought of a widowhood spent alone
amid all that silence filled her with dread
and she begged his promise. He nodded once
in cautious accord. Now, fifty years hence,
she lives contented with neighbors at hand
and a house she can manage. As for him,
he stands at the window in reverie
as though in the empty street he can see
acres and acres of newly-plowed land.
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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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