4

In the rush-thick swale you stand all arm-bent like elbows, as if you don’t know, we’ve stumped you: we’ll never stump you. You’ve lived a hundred years twice, three times, we’re unsure. Your middle was taped once, as if to mean business, you smart in pink. We watched them do it, their short shorts, boots, shirts whose chests flapped wide or straps were strings. We marveled at sun glowing scalps, well-made hamstrings, health. We’re sorry to have tingled. We want you to ourselves.

Gone are the elders at your backside but up grow youth, your hill once old with barrel-stumps looming, shorn now of bests, left to bramble and teasel and fungus and those seedlings and yearlings and tens that reach and green and button the soil.

The valley sings seaside blown inland, cool and damp and electric at our roofs. We pull closer our sheets, lovers’ weights, furs, quilts, while dreaming dunes, daughters, wolves, marbles, the birds’ early throats. Up the road circle cows around calves against villains.

Here comes the train; you remain so composed while we clatter in dishware, silverware, mixing bowls, books, hair pins, succulents, squeak toys, rifles, rattles, teeth, coins, tracks stalking river past vineyard trunking deeply, canes whose leaves fan fruit still new and hard and green with sugar, its love for heat and light.

We think of you limber and fluttering and new. You and the river and the river here first, a mother, a cousin, a comfort, a breast or bolt of hair to chase and catch. Then you young, then more, at last tall to her rock and stump and islands, her riffles and pools. Did her winter roar cause in you a shudder like we might should we in our pits and pockets burn for another? Road arrived, bridge, train, a better bridge, school, mail. The school fell down, the mail burned, the road remained, the bridge grew stronger, the houses filled. Deer and elk and bear and lion ran the mountain like dreams, stitched through trees, while turkey and quail and mourning dove pecked beaks thrust for bug.

That boy you saw once on the cliffside, dangling, perhaps you felt his heart flap, grown up to be a story, to build a red and decked and rowed view, one twined and guided and pruned and snipped and rooted to the seep of your love beneath soil. The gladiolas lean now wide-mouthed with color. It is August again, hot, hornets out stalking and arrows nosing for hides and you in your field, furred in moss and chubby with leaf, you watching us as us, and before us you watched others and before them you a sentinel for those four-hooved or many-clawed or only winged or nothing but long, scaled muscle or all fiber and cellulose, you, once, something new.