by Benjamin Pryor
Opening a box of whipstitched cardboard
I feel the lonesome ancestral weft and see
Ma in the tall pasture.
We played games with sticks, toys chipped from slate,
burlap sacks, fish like glass, antique marbles,
dogwood chalices, ornate grapes.
Pa cut off chicken heads on the backyard block,
bloody necks in crazy
entrechats around the woodhouse.
I unpack his stoic beans, unfold her starry quilts,
but remembrance is a watershed black creek,
its granite too big for bridges.
When Pa’s daddy was thirty-four
and logging the Snowbird Mountains
a tulip poplar crushed him with its champagne cups.
His widow of six in Stecoah, Julie leveled a shotgun
on officers from the Good Fellas Orphanage
in her scrub-dirt yard. They turned back.
Splitting wood has roughed my palms.
The last gold dollar has gone. Old wisdom remains:
the beard of the broom cannot sweep
without the shaft of the handle.
Witches pass through keyholes
to find a grinning stag. Hollers and coves
run down to valleys and gaps.
Old Scratch still could sell a tin dipper
to a spring lizard.
