The evolving landscape

The high acres belong to grass, the farmer
wearing blond straw hat and earplugs
mows twice a year and pulls a bailer
across the severed blades until the field
is dotted with circles the size
of wishing wells. These dry
through July and August, by September
they'll line his rusted fence, the barbed
and broken wire tufted here and there
where the coarse hair of a deer
has snagged, sometimes their back legs
catch though they continue in flight.

This winter, starting with the silver maple
sapling, a one on the left, hay bales
are six zeroes to the right, I see the number
one million as I walk down the mountain, asleep
under snow, to the flat spot where water pools
before it falls through rock to the river
that will dream it slowly and with luck
to the Gulf. At the ravine beyond the pool,
I often think of the math of the place,
lethargic subtraction by wind and raindrop,
I taste earth in the runoff, bits of rock,
and can only guess how long this cut has been
in the making, a million years is a second
to the earth, it begins narrow, no more
than a wedge you might force with your boot,
but ends fifty feet deep and lined with shale,
which juts and breaks in browns and tans, colors
of dried leaves and Moroccan skin, which falls
and piles like a jigsaw dumped on a table
late at night, when sleepless, you heal
pieces together into beauty, some lilacs
by a painter going blind or a cathedral
built over centuries for a God of patience.
An oak grows sideways from the wall of this
small canyon, the roots push out from shale
and turn ninety degrees like plumbing, like an elbow
toward sky, the oak grows as persistence
given form, given leaves and chlorophyll
to drink the sun, or fate, the tree will fail
sooner here than elsewhere, shale is a kind
of sand, the ravine a place of appetite
in the land, it opens and eats itself
to open more, will spread over time
into the shape of nothing, a node of vanishing
that will swallow the tree and feed it
to the tender hooks of water.

Weeks ago, on the low branches of this improbable
life, I found offal, intestines and stomach
of a possum or raccoon, I looked up
into a sunrise of strange and glistening jewels,
still wet, steaming from the body
that had kept their secrets, probably I'd spooked
a crow eating another few weeks of song,
if the grinding of crows can be flattered a tune.
Most of the works of the animal are gone, just
a piece now on the ground, a dark and blood brown
nubbin, and every day I think of the hard fruit
from one of those awful cakes we send at Christmas,
for a decade I mailed the same one back and forth
with my brother until he took it outside
and shot it with a twelve gauge. And every day
I expect the matting of leaves and twigs
to be free of this snatch of spleen,
this snack of colon, that a night critter
has trotted it away in its mouth, and every day
it's nearly where it was, a little darker perhaps
today, a bit more flecked with dirt, but it persists
and I know something must come of it, not even waste
goes to waste, that spring will drag it under
on its drenched tongue and one April day
of sun I'll stand in this spot and a flower
of flesh, of tiny hairs and teeth,
of feral sound will look up at me and blink,
or just a snowdrop, the white bell of it
ringing.

Bob Hicok
The Southern Review
Volume 42, Number 2
Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Louisiana State University.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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