DIRT ROAD DETOUR

By Tom Sheehan

A granite foundation made of lonely dominoes beside the road,
flung into or out of it. One strand of wire, only because trees
carry it, dull years making it soft, could yet manage a cow or two.
I pass by once here where others will also never pass again, their
sweat scalding the clearing-field rock walls, the ax handles they
wore down gone long into the ashes and their indifferent palms.
Toil and labor is all odor and touch here, clean to the top of the
ridges, yet I hear the rush of wind as a tree lets go and the shudder
as high limbs come to know the earth again.

There are wild strawberries owning to other generations, plums
gone to deep purple masking, turnips playing games underground,
an ax head bleeding rust into thousand-year old soil. I ride in a vehicle
warranted for fifty thousand miles. In these fields one man might
have traveled that far in two lifetimes at rock walls, tree displacement,
winters full of cuts and curses. The deer path was near, just under
a hogback saddling back acres. Small brook trout, all these spawnings
later, hide under the same bank as if the same shadow of the same man
throws down its startling life on white waters shaping the Earth’s edge.

The engine stops, hairs of steam rising from it, this Appalachian hill turns
beneath an ideal sun. I feel muscles working all about me, thin echoes
of distant energy that cleaned this hill from dawn to dusk of everything
in the way of necessity. Squash lay here like dinosaurs and beets moled
down until sugar was discovered in the sweetness of the ground. Such a
path I could not have cut, nor stormed back at winter where he stormed,
his voice rising into treetops and midnight full of an hour’s listening.

If I were to go back, it would not be the same. Only the stone faces
in the soft but relevant earth remain untouched.



 

The current Journal in print is
Winter

5 1/2" x 5" 2008 Wolf Moon Calendar just $10.00 each
More Info

More Info

© Wolf Moon Press 2002-2007 all rights reserved.

Submission Guidelines