By Andrew Grace
The bagworms set up their crystal tenements.
A noon moon.
I have not had a drink yet.
My thumb’s pike scars aren’t healed.
A fox like a small rip in the fabric
Between hell and here. There is more to life than just life.
This is where all the pain comes from.
You can take pain and lay it out
Like blank pages on a table.
From above it looks like windows
Of a building full of snow.
I shovel. You do too. We’re all in here digging.
There is no Jesus Jesus enough for Ohio
According to billboards declaring Ohio the one true Hell,
Its river scum made of midge shucks,
its hills of shale.
It’s all spray painted: underpass, boxcar and lamb.
The billboards publish Hell under a sky of leaked snow.
The hills match the curve of the human eye.
If only Ohio held a graceful detachment from being Ohio.
If only Ohio’s Jesus would come back,
if only,
Heaven notwithstanding, there was an Ohio Ohio enough.
Every trout in Michigan has vanished. I haven’t
Been here in two months. Back in
Ohio, I stripped the house of my body
For copper wire. It has taken me two weeks
To catch a single brown. I held the fish by the mouth above
The water and took a picture. I do this to prove
What I wanted to happen happened.
It is cruel. I shouldn’t have to
Use others to prove I was here.
Like daylight, my vanishing should be enough.
It’s all fatal, the early summer buttermilk light,
V on V of crow, fatal,
the sun that grunts forward like a lineman,
Waves knuckling North. The stones.
My daughters’ white nightgowns. Flooded timber,
Its piles of yellowed foam. Even survival
Is fatal, thank goodness. Every inch, every shimmer.
Otherwise, it’s just the so what prairie.
A little blood and air.
Shelter here, mineral there, meaningless mercy.
The future has no eyes or tongue or hair. Like a trout,
It wants most to cease being
examined. In every future
You see much beauty and die. By now the trout is thrashing.
Its eyes seem dead already
Which is how the future’s eyes would look if it had them.
Why keep asking when the answer
Is always the same? In all your life you had a few hours free
So you walked alone. You approached
Wild animals. You saw the moment they chose to flee.
Andrew Grace taught at Stanford University, Washington University and the University of Cincinnati before recently joining the English Department at Kenyon. His books of poetry include A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing, 2001), Shadeland (Ohio State University Press, 2008) and Sancta (Ahsahta Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly and Prairie Schooner. He has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and the winner of an Academy of American Poets prize.
