Parts of a Story

Or, it could go like this, since
you want to know names,
places, people, particulars:

it was the particular paradise
of ninety acres of orchard grass
and a few scattered woods;
barbed wire, Holsteins,
and the plush of spring
as you feel it, wet beneath you,
when you sit down in a field in May —

or in the pasture's folds where the creek ran:
there were ores of a gray clay
she could sit and mine all morning;
rotting trees, whose meat flaked off
like the flesh of fish;
or in the barn where the straw-dust
harried and swirled.

It was in an inheritance,
since it was given as all earth is given,
as ready to receive the pledge
of a young girl as the cow-flops
and the dull thud of horses' hooves.

We may start here in this field,
with her kneeling, with the colors wet and black
suddenly pouring up —
but eventually we will have to confront the father,
then the ravishment by air,
then, still later —
the ravishment by imagination.

Mary Walker Graham
Poetry
Volume CLXXXVI, Number 5
September 2005

Copyright © 2005 by The Poetry Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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