BY JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS
I too take shelter in the body,
in the picks & plows, millstones, the indelicate hands working
a country back into loose soil. Above me, the once-scattered stars
clump together for warmth. Only so much remains for my daughter
to wish upon, for my son to name after mythical beasts, for my father
to cradle between steepled fingers reciting my mother’s name over
& over into specter. & our branches tire from holding so much
nothing. Rope swing snapped, not anything like a noose. Wild grass
browning around an empty silo. Not at all like the torch-lit bodies
the papers promise will wash away with the next good rain. I too
take shelter in this Catholic silence, in the overworked machinery rusted
in place, reddening the field, in these patchwork hands whiter than
next season’s hard frost. Here, a burn barrel for our unmended shingles,
the collapsed shed out back, the part of the animal we didn’t bother to eat. Here,
son, is your myth, your beast, where we watch a fawn crawl back into a bullet.
Postscript for a Flyover Country
so too the bruises the outlived machinery every empty rain-
rusted silo scorching the skyline praying grains rise all Jesus-
like to refill its mouth & as if all water is walkable how little we
really know of the bridgeless river our dead civilizing & spreading
seed & here we are crossing over recalling a primary school montage
of covered wagons loaded to the teeth with popsicle stick figures bent
over burlap-sewn oxen a few flecks of paint for blood the same water now 34,000 feet below & arid as a memory withheld because
it hurts less than it should because there’s an order in which things are broken because i carry my grandfather’s rags & rages like a cross that isn’t really anything like a cross to make room for yet another bridge another sky- line raw & hungry broken-down body combine plowshare boyhood another
cow leans into its bolt foreclosed heaven somewhere down there
home, its windows kicked in
John Sibley Williams is the author of The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), and Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize). A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of Caesura Poetry Workshop.
Process Note: I suppose most of my writing comes intuitively, in that I don’t set out with a given theme or larger personal or cultural meaning that I need to communicate. I usually begin a poem with a series of images that haunt me. Then I try to invent a world (conceptually and emotionally) for these images to inhabit.