AN OLD LINEMAN NEAR THE WOOD COUNTY HOME

By David Adams

He leans back in his harness, one arm
hooked idly on the topmost rung.
As the joke goes, he has lived here
nearly all his life. It is late August, after all,
and even the blackbirds cry for rain.

Through the years he has learned
to take the lineman’s view of everything—
the crumbled cistern, white as chalk
amidst the drying corn. The asphalt
like a snake the crows pecked gray.

He sees a tractor’s blue cough near Miñeta’s barn.
Today the locusts buzz like relatives,
like the endless voices in the lines
crackling back and forth across this county.
Once, at noon, he was certain that he’d heard
his mother sobbing gently to the wind.
Once he had a wife with voices, too.

If he stares at the gray spiders on his arms,
if he thinks, just now, that nothing
is as long as this one life,
if he remembers, at lunch,
some hornets crawling on golden pears…
But he tells no one what he sees.
It’s too much like a story,
too much like an empty mirror.

Behind him and across the road
his rusted van rests in the drive
of the abandoned County Home.
The whispers of its bricks and cornices,
the ghostly faces in the panes,
are lost in canopies of beech and sycamore
as he watches the faint moon
and wonders out its silences.



 

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