32
CIRQUE
Uncovering the abandoned property What alchemical vines cover was once home. The surrounding fields guard empty space. When a storm blackens in, threatening to unhinge the tin talisman screwed over the front door, the wind deafens us to sharp cries of small prey: field mouse, rabbit, vole — each running to the underground city I found deep beneath the barley field. The inhabitants thought stalk chatter the sounds of a coming apocalypse. Unable to defend my knowledge with reason, they packed my suitcase with yellow dahlias, blinked expectantly, guided me home. Our fat cattle tread their roof now; I lead them over its near invisible camber, back and forth, as the moon lights my brother, cleaning his blunderbuss in the front yard. Some of the fields have not been planted. Some of the pines have remade the world — those that are split, cleaved-apart by bolts of lightening, their yearly rings exposed. The lark goes over my brother’s head, back and forth. Back and forth. It knows the aplomb and current of our lives, spells it in cloud. It is male, the shape of bathos; a forked body prying at the blue. No one is beside my brother; his ankles hemmed in wet straw. He looks down through a clean barrel, whistles. How he flows from one motion to another. How unchanged he is between all etched spaces. Birds envy him. The cattle, having reached the far end of the meadow, where the canebrake gives way to bull thistle and burdock, are lowing. Their dung piles steam. I buried my suitcase with a collection of the talisman’s fingers we had replaced over the decades, until we arrived here, running. Now the decades run and burrow in any dry ditch beside asphalt. Now my brother sharpens a corn knife at the grinding wheel beneath the workbench in the machine shed. After my eyes adjust to the dimness, I see the dust floor imprinted with the deep teeth of tractor tread, and the Gleaner combine behind his shoulder is no longer a dinosaur. Yes it is, he says. He is ready to cut vines, fingers tracing the uneven blue-grey blade edge. His other fist tightens pink around the smooth cork handle. He swings once at the air. The lark swoops. Or is it a bat. Those flesh-colored vines, he says, roping over the roof, clogging the gutters. They have got to go.
Suanne Sikkema
Bin Emptying This ribbed space, named bin, is hum of harvest, Is gist of impossible summer, Deluge. Our comeuppance for grace is work; For wheat, is mineral and whisk of seed. We live behind corrugated metal Sealed with tar. Our life is not the honey, Not what you recall from a magazine, But crest of salt from sweat, inbraided prongs That wind virtue over black macadam. We empty bin beneath rainbow, maple Leaf and thunderhead. Bin’s mouth is an eave, A spectra, screwed to concrete and humming Tinny notes before a torn open earth.
Janet Levin