Unsettling the Farm

Over everything drift
clouds of stars, rivers of stars.
Its Halloween profile sharp
in a sky of indigo, the pale orange
crescent moon wanes above a forested
ridgeline cut deep and left high
by the Elkhorn. Barking, yapping,
DuAnne and Pea-Wit agitate the night
around the house, as if down the hill
other dogs are coursing the long
creek-hugging arms of fertile bottomland
under its slab of ground fog.
Awake, fretting again about his sheep,
the farmer gets up and stares into the dark.

At daylight, after coffee and cigarettes,
he trucks himself and the help
to plant-beds to pull up and bundle
green finger-thick tobacco
for setting in the nine harrowed acres.
As the Dodge bounces along
in dried ruts, the farmer
spots a collie, a ratty stray
running hell-bent, spooked
by the pickup clanking. So
the farmer brakes, gets out
and whistles, wishing
he had the rifle with him,
watching the collie disappear
where the field turns to nettles.
Then the workday begins, heats up
and goes on into sunset, the crew
pulling plants, setting plants,
the farmer brooding—tobacco, money,
rain, mold. Work done, his supper
down too fast, the farmer drops
off into sleep and might dream about
his fragile crop. In fog,
pursued, his sheep run
desperately.

:: Dan Howell, Lost Country (1993)

Whatever It Gives

After an overnight storm, ice
cloaks the open surfaces of everything
outdoors, including two of three
steps I walk down at seven
when my ride comes by—one step
dry, then I slam down hard
on the next, on my back.
But I get up unhurt because I fell
too fast to think.

*

Five days a week I wear the same
old clothes and never shave, learning
ancient secrets of invisibility—to be
dirtied by labor, for example.

*

One day I’m out on a huge flat roof doing
cornice work, kneeling, driving nails.
Some friends make up this crew. Here,
this high, we see the weather coming.
The entire sky is changing, temperature falls
forty degrees in fifteen minutes and everyone
stands excited, freezing, still.

*

It rains too hard to continue
so we truck off to the Paddock Club
for beer and bad food. Exiting at dusk,
wavering in the mist of a spring
fog, I sing out loud, walking
the few blocks home. White crowns,
snakeroot, nod in my uncut backyard.
Two dogs come charging out to greet me.

*

I’m walking up and down a hill one day
in cold yellow mud, carting
lumber on my left shoulder like a White
Mule: 44 waterlogged 15 ft. redwood 2 x 10s.
two at a trip (88 in the stack, three
packing). And then we build decks, drive
16s overhead for the rest of the day.
At home, settled neck-deep in the tub,
I find an apple-sized
bruise on my left shoulder. I pick lint
from a blood-capped thumb,
both arms, both shoulders twitching,
stiffening,
these good days.

:: Dan Howell, Lost Country (1993)

Denizens

By a dry swale across a meadow
of tussocks, a pastureland of bluegrass
and fescue—the Mental Hospital

For a week we’ve been vanishing
ghostly creatures in a bright pall of dust

there, wearing cheap snouts
to be able to breathe,
stuffing ears with foam cylinders

hoping to muffle a continuous
jackhammer hell
in a windowless 18 x 36 cooler with ceramic
block-wall echoes and a killing
floor of three-inch concrete
then tile, then ten more footlike
inches of concrete cured harder
every year of its 35 or so—
and everything has to go

So we like our short breaks

With sore hands, we wipe away
the pale mask of work

We move outside
and little clouds of dust move with us,

trailing to where we slump upright
in the breeze, the blue air
Today, from above, we hear
a noise, we look:

thirty feet high
along the ridge of the cafeteria
roof strides a bearded man, tall
and thin and wearing the state’s pajamas

He stops and waves
We wave too

:: Dan Howell, Lost Country (1993)