Idlewilde

for Malcolm and Neal

August, humidity, legs scratched
by green tree limbs as we careened
through a pasture beyond the barn
burned by your cousins, practicing their spitting
and urinating--dress rehearsals for manhood;
stretching trackless miles into a future
we could almost see from outhouse rooftops,
and silos along Locust Farm Road.

I could not keep up with you,
running down the cowpaths,
passing the sumac and Queen Anne’s Lace,
orchards devastated by drought
--a sepia-colored
photograph of boys leaping from
the loft into haystacks,
rapture working in reverse,
trotting down the creekbank we simply named:
the mountain where, just below,
we threw pebbles--sacred with the patina
of our fading youth on our foreheads
an anointing--a healing balm.

………………………Small fists, crabbed,
against the Kingdom of Callaway.
Praying with our tears
past your grandfather’s house,
down the steeply-graded gravel road,
over the summer creekbed where I
chased a lizard around a boulder.
Finding the whited bones of
Ackerman’s prized bull.
Box turtles, channel catfish,
and cotton mouths roamed Stinson Creek
until the whippoorwill’s called.

Smoldering greenwood ash clogged
your woodstove from that last winter,
all four boys slept on the floorboards
coughing, laughing, and smelling the way
young boys will even after the evening bath
in communal tubwater.
The wood of your house came
from the scrublands
where we played.
I felt poverty sailing on the August jetstream
--those dark provinces of night,
engulfing me, one eye tuned
to the flowering ironweed.

………………………Stepping through
the bended wire you held for me
rusted sharpies digging into my pant’s cuff,
lingering in the flesh of
corduroy--that country earth inhaling me
into the red clay
where soon enough
I will follow the rest of my bloodline
speaking wearying details of yesterday’s
grocery list, a long line of undone chores,
estrangements, and abortions lay in the potter’s field.

Burnt-out share croppers
coughing up pieces of lung--black, sultry . . .
they fled from the yellow jack summers
of the southern delta.
Irridescent algae chirping in the water--tree frogs
collecting in metal pails, shining lights;
boys pursuing men who killed coyotes
from truckbeds with rifles our blood was hot to possess.
I remember being overwhelmed.
Sitting in silence under the mothlights of the porch.

………………………..Uncles slipping
slowly into thirsty fissures, from drought,
under the long stones beyond 1897--
stretching backward and fainting under
the cairns, covering the enigmas with painted veils
--grass and daffodils--blowing the opaque filaments,
continuing to grasp the green stems
while sucking the life from the sweet
honeysuckle, the pads of our feet green
from the ink of wild gooseberries.

Roots creating carbuncles
in White Cloud Cemetery,
your eyes cast over the plot were filled
with the suns of ten thousand worlds.
Grandad commanding legions from the gallery,
sword drawn. Oh, but your lies were vinegar,
Still we listened, to your stories with a pound of salt:
“The cockleburrs,” I cried--
the trail of childhood became a switchback and now
your daughters have caught us . . .

……………………….No one taught
us to be grown. There were no rituals.
No instruction booklet. It is either live, or die:
we pretend to have a choice.
Favoring that missing rib, ‘Ow, my sore arm!’
You said, to protect your birth defect
Sporting horn-rimmed eyeglasses--
a dyslexic farmer you promised to make.
We tried to convince you to wear your
black patch for lazy eye;
now too exhausted
for anything except coffee and cigarettes.

We hid from your father’s drunken rages
on the dank stones of the Mausoleum floor.
Burning candles and drinking sweet wine,
throwing the empties off the corroded
1-ton bridge into the claypits;
the sound of impermanence on pale, flat,
creekrocks below, daring a second passage
through the birth canal;
hands feeling along the channel of an Ozark cavern
--searching for faith--
finding it in the price of a ferry
across the river from mainland . . .
………………………oarthump in outer night.

*Daren Dean received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His creative work and interviews have appeared in such places as the Chattahoochee Review, Deck, and Image (forthcoming). He is working on a collection of poems tentatively titled, The Sun of Arles. He teaches at Central Methodist University. He lives in Missouri with his wife and daughter.