Compass and Clock. David Sanders

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СКАЧАТЬ houses shrank behind additions.

      I had my bearings then that day but no

      directions, and I wound up out of town

      at an orchard farm I’d known of as a boy

      to see if they might have the lost addresses

      of those who in my mind were so nearby.

      The woman working the syrup and cider shop

      looked up and asked me how I was. “I’m fine,”

      I said. “We haven’t seen you in a while,”

      she grinned, telling me her maiden name.

      And then I understood the sculptors’ claim

      of finding the shape within the stone, and saw

      the girl I’d known twenty-five years before.

      We talked a while about our lives, our jobs,

      before she told me where I had to go.

      But even now I can’t get past the fact

      she recognized without a moment’s thought

      my face unseen by her since I’d left school.

      I, who traveled far afield, put streets

      between us, languages and lives and years,

      returned to her and to the rest, no doubt,

      untouched by time. The change was theirs, it seemed,

      incremental as an orchard’s growth,

      but real. And I, like the unlucky dead,

      would gladly move among them as their own.

       Contrivance

      National Arboretum

      Consider these trees,

      stationed on their slatted stands,

      tended centuries

      and trained to be small.

      Root-pruned and limb-wired—such

      techniques could enthrall

      the quietest mind.

      Appetite renders distant

      the spruce one might find

      clinging to a cliff

      or maples burnished by wind,

      positing as if

      on each. As small as

      they are, the feigned perspectives

      offer up solace

      (What could they be there?

      What do we want them to be?

      —Islands built on air!)

      among their trunks, burled

      and dwarfed and stripped of their bark,

      in our full-scale world.

       John Porter Produce

      This is the shower

      that every day settles the dust.

      In less than an hour

      it’s passed. Then, a crust

      of mud coats everything.

      Since now it’s raining,

      duck inside. And though the rain won’t stop,

      it turns into a mercurial drop

      in a bucket. Near the grapes,

      a cat naps.

      On the wall, a calendar

      noting the days the lunar phases appear

      is open to June

      of last year.

      Not that time stopped then,

      or slowed, it’s just that it has gone

      as quietly as their game of dominoes,

      which anyone might lose.

      Eggs and fruit are what the days produce.

      Each old man knows

      the weight and cost of all

      the goods by holding them in hand. Still, the one

      who’s just played his turn

      weighs them on the scale

      for a stranger who happened in

      while the fruit sat ripening.

      Step outside—

      the rain has quit and the mud has nearly dried.

      The sun is out

      and the air, unlike before, is not so dirty.

      Inside the bag, the fruit

      is fresh, almost bitter, and gritty.

       Dressing the Pheasant

      After the knife hit the craw

      of the bird gone stiff and cool

      with ice and time in transit,

      I removed the seeds, still whole,

      from below the cocked head

      and fingered them like beads,

      one prayer apiece, as if grain

      picked from the gullet of a bird

      were of greater grace than if not,

      in a hunter’s boot, let’s say,

      shook out and left to grow,

      or before the bird was shot,

      if hours had СКАЧАТЬ