Forrest Pritchard's Blog, page 5

Old Barn (#33)

There’s an old barn from my

Childhood that no longer exists,

Cavernous, capacious,

Holding great heaps

Of nothing that makes sense—

Canvas buckets, barley,

Barely able to keep hay dry,

Feeding spiders—

Gone now, except for foundation

Stones, thousand pound

Beams once spanning widths of

Sky, capped with tin,

Beneath which,

In 1988, in the straw mow,

My best friend Harry Jenkins

Play-wrestled Jessica Dillon

Into the softness,

While the girl next door and I

Wordlessly excused ourselves

Into the light,

Fecund, irresistible,

To the mud of the stream bank,

Far older than the straw,

Barley, even the barn itself,

And making more sense

To me then, now, than

Wood, thrust splintering into air,

Already swept away.

Sun Unseen (#32)

“Look!” she says,

Amazed by the flowers

I’ve walked past for weeks,

Blooming beside the weeds

I had been pulling.

“Oh, aren’t they

The craziest thing?”

Indeed, I agree, they are,

Noticing them for the first time,
—the craziest thing—
Felt, at that moment, acutely as
Raindrops on skin, or the day

I finally marveled at the sun,

Twenty years into adulthood.

So I stare, close as I’m able

To seeing, the purples, the yellows,

The rose-colored petals.

I lean in close, as though

By leaning I’ll learn anything,

Observe anything,

Recalling that the sky,

Its blue light radiant,

Woke me that very morning,

Before promptly becoming unseen.

Pastoral (#31)

When Beethoven composed
His sixth symphony,
Nicknamed The Pastoral,
He might never have dreamed that,

Two hundred and eleven

Years later, floating from the electric

Speakers of a horseless carriage,

Half a planet distant, his music

Would play to an audience of

Grunting hogs, squealing with feeling,

As the farmer, knowing the arpeggios

Best from Looney Tunes reruns,

Thought of wise-cracking rabbits,

Foulmouthed ducks, and pantsless pigs,

Notes soaring skyward through a summer

Pasture, levitating with blue butterflies.

Skipping Stones (#30)

1.

The first time someone said

“I can make a stone float,”

You didn’t believe them.

But part of you wanted to—

Age four, five, knowing already that,

Heavy in the hand, rocks sink;

You were nobody’s fool, acutely

Aware that a trick was afoot;

We grow jaded so early!

But oh, succor, that

Small part of our brains

Willing to be persuaded—

So we watch, snapped from
The wrist, rifled, centrifugal,
The stone skips, spinning,
Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!

Across the water,

Marvelous reward for the

Willing disbeliever!

From that instant on,

As teenagers, adults,

We fall in love again, every time;

Counting each skip, each ripple,

Eyes wide as children.

2.

Counting each skip, each ripple,

As though something were at stake.

Silly, to think how in sixth grade,

My class was challenged by our

Principal, to beat him in

Rock skipping—On the line?

A two thousand word essay, versus

Dinner of the student’s choosing.

Only three kids took him on,

And when my friend Matt won,

He requested surf and turf

With aristocratic nonchalance,

Taking great satisfaction in his

Lobster tail and tenderloin

As our principal, with teacher’s wages,

Blanched at the eighty dollar check.

So simple, to wing a stone

Sideways, askew, slipping,

Under-arcing, overreaching—

Everyone wants one more throw.

3.

I spent my stone-skipping youth

On the banks of the Greenbrier,

Pocahontas County, West Virginia,

Where fractured slate was as

Abundant as stars,

Shining wet along the bank—

Practice, endless practice,

Smooth-edged squares,

Triangles, parallelograms,
The dark water swallowing
Each emotionlessly,
Only the smallest glub

As each stone disappeared,

Never to be reclaimed—

Never to be skipped again—

By me, I mean.

4.

I was mostly married, once,

To a woman who took her

Stone skipping quite seriously,

Though she tried very hard

Not appear so. Thinly veiled,

Delighting in victory with a

Sinuous happy dance,

Two stepping on the muddy

Shore as she tallied each skip,

Counting thirty when I called “twenty nine”,

Innocuous, close as ripples,

Fading in the silky current.

5.

Now my son tells me,

“Dad, did you know you can

Skip rocks along the road?”

And he shows me, this teenager,

Against a black river of macadam,

Sparking the asphalt

With tiny fires, igniting the

Atmosphere in its wake

6.

What joy, forgetting what we know—
Kiss! Kiss! Twenty two kisses.
No, twenty three! Watch.
I can make a stone float.

August Picnic (#29)

August, all ready

Without being readied—

Only the pitching of

Peach pits,

Bruised tomato divots,

Tossed towards

The cherry trunk and

Gobbled up by grass, gone!

Gone, too,

Corn silk,

Garlic skins,

Filament husks,

Carried on the breeze

Through the red bud leaves,

Invisibly eddying,

Cooling bare legs.

A yellow-legged tree frog,

One eye gold,

One pupil-less eye

Platinum,

Fetched, full-handed—

Whitman’s summer,

Onward and outward,

Spread across gingham,

And death is bowls brimming

With plums, pears,

Peaches, tomatoes,

Diced garlic, and hot peppers.

Wounded Wasp (#28)

Wounded wasp,

Turning circles in the sunshine,

Hot with rage and

One warped wing—

I can’t help you,

But wish I could!

To be a surgeon

For your ailment—

Setting angles straight,

Poulticing pain;

But surely you would only

Sting me, bite me,

Passing poison

With no remorse.

Oh, wasp! Such reliable

Waspness! Bless you—

I will see you again
In tall grass, beatific,
Close to the earth,
Where cooling rains linger.

Lost Path (#27)

Twelve hours of July heat,
The workday ended weary
Well beyond dark,
Dewy stars sparkling,

And beneath my feet,

The path I’ve followed

For twenty five years

Has suddenly vanished—

Tangled in chicory,

Queen Anne’s lace,

Knee-deep in timothy,

Knit with clover,

And I understand

Suddenly that it’s

Me who has vanished,

Star-blind, stumbling—

The reliable path, so trodden,

Only inches left or right

In the corporeal darkness, is

A mile, an ocean, a world distant.

Mud Daubers (#26)

Peace-seeking mud daubers,

Lovers of good work,

Blue-black glinting

In the morning sun—

When, at age six, I climbed
The hot cinderblocks of the
Sow shed, and one brick tumbled,
Disturbing their labor—

Swarm! So many stings!

Instant admonishment,

Bare legs blistered with welts.

Moments later, in the farmhouse

My stone-eyed uncle asked me

“Why are you crying?”

For the same reason,

I now understand,

That a forty year old man

Could ask a child

Such a caustic question:

Acute suffering.

But more mysteriously,

I knew I cried also for the

Humming haste of the wasps,

Dutifully heuristic, adults whom

I respected, and had never

Intended to disturb.

The moment I fled, they calmed,

Returning to their parging,

Plastering pipes.

Pipes? Flutes!

Cylinders stuffed with spiders,

Beetles, flies. Feasts.

Look! Their waists,

Thin as bow hair;

Susurrant wings

Softly warning. Merciful.

Metallic musicians, conducting,

Near the reeds at

The edge of the marsh

Balling wet clay,

Mandibles filled with mud,

Pragmatic silence.

Futile, to proffer pain,

When grace is your language!

Farm Poem #25

Then the trees are bursting with crab apples,

Hard and red and reticent as their namesake,

Thousands for the picking, if one enjoys eating

Sour rocks. The hardscrabble fruits of our

Ancestors: Wild persimmon, rhubarb,

Damson plum—tart until boiled, stirred,

Sweetened, canned, conjured comestible

With the alchemy of sugar, trophic and treasured.

Still, today, here’s a tree awash in fruit and,

To be sure, nothing will happen, nothing

More than noticing, that is, such outrageous

Abundance, sequestered from the subsoil.

No nostalgia, the pantries of my childhood! Golden

Rims gleaming, ruby jams, carmine jellies; now,

The same fruit, round and reliable as Jupiter, is left

Hanging in the southeast sky; so bright, so unavailable.

Farm Poem #24

My grandmother,
A nurse by training,
Attended my pneumonia-
Stricken grandfather
In the Winchester, Virginia
Hospital, waiting
Until he was able to
Sit upright without coughing
Before marrying him.

She was also a nudist,
A fact which—
Like for most of us—
Probably titillated
Then soon became routine
To my to-nonsense
Grandfather, up to his elbows 
In tractor grease,
Split knuckles,

The dust of the day
Nursed away
By the clothed
Equally well as the naked.
But I suspect that,
Being a farmer,
He was already privy to
That liberating insight
That razes most walls:

It wasn’t about him.
The same couldn’t be said,
However, for his four
Spinster sisters;
Their marriage
Not only came with
A farm, fresh air,
And all the sunshine
In eastern West Virginia,

It also came with a live-in
Elizabeth,
A Louisa,
A Welford
And an Anne,
Each of whom
Had passed decades
T&A-free for
23.9 hours a day,

And were now
Suddenly greeted
By my grandmother’s
Naked bum, bent
At the oven,
Boobs swinging,
As she set about baking
Cakes each afternoon.
Let’s face it,

It would challenge anyone.
And while my great aunts
Grumbled and griped,
My pragmatic grandfather
Set about being proactive,
Annexing the sunny
East lawn and
Building a shotgun
Kitchen where,

Through one thin wall,
Leb, Louisa, Annie and Waddy
Cooked daily feasts of
Fried chicken,
Spoon bread,
Stewed tomatoes,
Spanish Cream,
While my grandmother,
Twelve inches away,

Crafted pound cakes,
Haloed beauties,
Almost angel food, just,
I’m sure she imagined,
As God intended—
And just
I’m sure my aunts imagined,
As God intended,
Also.