WHERE DARKNESS FALLS
EARLY ON THE FIELDS
Part Five
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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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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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The Widower
It may have been only the consequence
of his deepening age, or of something more,
something to do with the unendurable
starless nights or the drifted acres
of whiteness stretching forever away
like a dream of death ~ but whatever the cause,
he heard the scrabbling patter of mice
over carelessly piled forks and plates
as the sound of his wife downstairs at the sink
drying the supper dishes. And later,
forgetting he'd put on the kettle himself,
he waited for its insistent shrill
to summon her from her sewing, and when
it persisted, dismissed it as nothing more
than the endless and purgatorial keen
of wind in the eaves. He tendered his watch
in the nameless hour, sunk in his chair,
submerged in a phantom procession of shades
that moved through his mind like glimmerings cast
on the wall from flames in the grate, all the while
expecting to hear her foot on the stair,
till like some old sorrow from somewhere deep
in the subterranean soul of the house,
a timber groaned and he knew she was gone.
He hoisted his overcoat up to his chin
and, turning his back to the deepening cold,
slumbered by fits and starts. In the kitchen,
a curtain, darkened and limp with steam,
adhered to the windowpane till it froze.
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The Old Masterson Place
Though barren for years, still it crowns the knoll,
walls weathered gray, roof a gaping hole,
windows like empty sockets in a skull.
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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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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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