Pastoral

Here is the dusk with its pink plastic bag
               in the tines of a branch, the wheeze

in the wind's throat before the wind lies
               down on water. Here is the brink

revealing the icy spring's pulmonary
               green, the grasses softly becoming.

The water is like the dark part of an x-ray
               sheet, possessing into itself

the shadows building between trees, shrubs
               roundly black like pots. Traced

onto nothing, here is my grandfather
               pushing breath out of his locking

lungs, and memory dividing like his cells:
               the papery, hollowed-out face;

the brown mash of herbs he sipped, trying
               to outwit what had lodged there,

the crone of another self, the enraged
               sibyl shrinking, taking the world

of him with it. It is stupid to keep seeing
               the body in the world, its parts

illuminated in the easy salary of images:
               hospital tubes in the coiled garden

hose, the plastic bag in the tree waiting
               like a lyre. And yet by these errors

what's beneath is sometimes fathomable:
               you running on the Potomac's banks,

your lungs pumped with the medicine that
               cures you as it didn't my grandfather,

the rain drumming mist out of the ground,
               the mud a gradually clinging weight.

Heading back, you decide to scale a country
               club's wall, diving naked into

the unguarded pool to wash off the mud.
               You tell me this as I try to unfurl your

hands, and you finally open them, showing
               damage that a door or hammer has

brought on each knuckle, the outlasting scars
               coarse as the nodes on a branch.

Rick Barot
TriQuarterly 120
Guest Edited by Joshua Weiner

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

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