Now when I see a night
that’s weak with clouds,
it makes me nervous.
All those rings
wrenched around the moon.
There are rhymes I don’t remember
that say whatever it is
such a sky’s rising
supposedly portends.
Whatever it is, I feel it.
Sometimes I wish
the night were unnecessary.
Most nights that I feel that way
I feel the same
about day come daybreak.
See the sun bleeding
through the trees? Not being
a sailor doesn’t make you
any safer from it. I used to think
being left-handed meant
I was more likely to die
in a car wreck. Turns out
the biggest risk is living.
There is a grimness
to that thought; something
shallow and permanent.
When I want to be
better than that,
I give myself
one of Whitman’s catalogs
to chew on. It doesn’t last,
that first, capacious bubble of patience.
However well he may have
wandered and adored it,
Whitman knew
the world is a livid vale of dust,
also that it’s insane
with blood, and he never even
wept in West Virginia.
When snow
surprised everyone in late
April in New Jersey, 1890,
did Whitman’s neighbors
roll their eyes
at all of his raw praise?
Even if they weren’t farmers,
they likely knew
what damage spring snows can do.
Did he? One book I’m reading
makes the claim that
“Whitman disliked farming
with some passion.”
In my one year
as a farmhand I laid fire pots
between orchard lines
whenever it would snow.
Everything about those hours—
the limbs’ frigid,
fractal beauty, briefly
outgrowing my discomfort
with the open—
I detested and desire.
Even sipping schnapps
between the rows, how
the darkness gave everything
the gauzy, aquatic depth
of the impersonal
and alluring. Going through,
setting down the tiny burning bowls,
I was as slow about that
as I was everything. My boss
called me Mr. Dreamy
and meant it
as an insult. I haven’t
gotten over it so much
as tried to sculpt my life
such that my being
dreamy isn’t going to cost
anyone’s bottom line.
One harvest day that year
I forgot which way
the road knifed and flipped
the truck
and walked away.
When the ambulance arrived,
I smiled and tried to wave it by.
When my boss arrived
he threw a wrench at me.
It was dark by then.
I’d been sitting there for hours.
The sky was clear.
The moon
blew through it.
The road below
was lit bright
with our tremendous apples.
My whole life
I have wondered
what’s become of me.
from The Newest Employee of the Museum of RuinFind more by Charlie Clark at the library
Copyright © 2020 Charlie Clark
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.