Farm Funeral

It is a great comfort
To pray to a Lord
Who can fill our every need

We gathered for our neighbor’s November
Funeral. She died at ninety-five years,
Falling at her son’s house, her
Hip breaking, sending her to the hospital
And complications and this:
Laid out in the farm house less than
Two miles from her birthplace.

All those years of driving horses into town
Of cooking for threshers each fall,
Of watching winter snows close the roads
For weeks at a time,
Those years show even as she lies silent,
Frail as kindling wood in the front parlor,
Surrounded by flowers too perfect for this house.

We are more together than at a loss.
Food piles up in the kitchen,
Granddaughters file in and out
Of the parlor, bored with latecomers’
Sympathies. The men
Sit in the kitchen and talk of picking
Corn and the young boy who lost his hand
In a husking bed two weeks ago.

The clock on the mantel chimes twice,
Starting a silence. The minister
Prays, we all pray.
The Twenty-Third Psalm is read
As the minister quiets the last
Of the sobbing with words of another
World. A sermon is read,
Heads drop into another prayer,
And it is over.

We are not alone under the grey sky,
The living turn to the living,
The sense of family, of the land
Suddenly seem very old. We are one.

:: William O. Boggs, Swimming in Clear Water (1989)

Volunteer Fireman's Night

It is hard to sleep, sometimes.
I remember the stale taste
Of the drowned man’s mouth
In the dark water
Beneath the Juva Bridge.
Sometimes I wake suddenly,
The vision of the pregnant wife’s
Eyes cold and fixed
On the last image of headlight
Coming across the center line.
In the smoke of cigarettes
I sometimes find the smell
Of the boy’s burnt thigh
I found
In a burned out farmhouse.

All of these, and others
In cars crushed by locomotives
I could not help, visit me
In darkness, give me blood clots
Larger than my hands.

:: William O. Boggs, Swimming in Clear Water (1989)

Juva

Who can love nightwater’s blackness
When a swimmer goes out as bait
To bring in the blueblack fish?
The rope trailing men at shore:
First dive to deep water, hoping
Not to find the body of search
But brushing then grasping
An arm convulsed and frozen.

The water like crude oil at surface
In the brilliance of flashlights,
The confusion of timebursting lung,
The draw of rope to land
And the deadness of a young man
In the quiet heat.

:: William O. Boggs, Swimming in Clear Water (1989)

Highway Hypnosis

The center line
Is a metronome,
Wheels drift onto
The berm and back.
Another radio station
Fades into static,
And it’s too much of an
Effort to tune another.
A trucker passes too
Close, so close that
The row of road permits
Can be read.
Everything falls back
To the steady pace.
It’s been like this
For the last two hundred
Miles. Another six
Hours to go.
Driving through America,
Four lanes limited access
America, right across the tops
Of old neighborhoods and wheat
Fields. Self-service fuel
Stops, sandwiches from machines.
More center line.
There’s really no place
I want to go.
There’s really no place
I want to stay.

:: William O. Boggs, Swimming in Clear Water (1989)

Are You Saved

Opal Green sits in a room full
Of clocks, the yellowed hairpin
Lace of her thin pillow
Like a September sun ascending.
The air smells old, though
The windows are open,
And she talks on
About her father working
On the railroad, riding
The rails, she says,
From Erie to Emporium
And back again.
The clocks still tick
In an odd chorus behind
Her lace-haloed thin hair,
And time is as confused
As the mixed strokes
Of different pendulums.
They all talk different,
She says, but time
Is all the same to each
Of them. The hour is a song
Of many bells lasting minutes,
Even at three in the afternoon
When they are all chiming,
The last beginning as the first
Is ending. She looks to a small
Picture of Jesus on the wall.
Sometimes I won’t have to think
Of time anymore, she asks, are you saved?

:: William O. Boggs, Swimming in Clear Water (1989)