Effigy
She finished her lesson on the black box
by asking a roomful of eight-year-olds how,
if they imagined it,
something becomes what it turns out to be,
then gazed toward the field, its promise
of stillness under the auspice of gathering snow.
Somewhere blocks away a mail truck closed its door.
Dogs began to bark.
She remembered her father telling her once
she must be a farmer’s daughter the way she loves rain.
And how rain saved their farm from a wall of fire
that pulled the plains away from the ground
like a ripcord. The silence of their neighbor’s soybean plots
became a shared silence, and together
they cased the smoldering acreage.
Something about magnitude in loss, then.
Something about what comes of being taken away.
Then the wind damage, burnt earth
charted for other places. A burial mound her father,
before she was born, tilled into then stopped
and cordoned off with chicken wire lay bare as it had before.
The fire finished before it got there.
But rain only allows one kind of sadness to make sense, and this
is about snow: its gentle insistence,
how it hushes minutes into months, makes a covered mouth
of wherever it lands.
If her students have learned anything it is that what we see
is affected. They have their own rituals of remembering
though they are too young to know it.
On the field trip to the circus she watched more than one of them
pocket a handful of peanuts from the floor. That’s it.
And the ones with an allowance from their parents chose to keep it,
the crisp bills like guarded cankers in their bags.
The light made a spangled sheet of their faces she carries in memory
now, a bed she remakes every morning even though
the term isn’t over.
Things have begun to leave before they’ve ended—
this winter, the children,
their faces as she sits in an empty room colored
through windows by curing dusk—all she’s been so willing to give
because she thought she could get it back.
Stations on the Opposite Shore
Off John Nolan Drive, the coal stacks still
in bloom, a pilot radios engine failure
to an eastside control tower before his twinengine
Beechcraft meets the stunned surface
of Lake Monona. And in the instant
he looks back to Otis Redding—unbelted,
hand pressed against the porthole window—
he’s taken to the bare-banked reservoir
of his youth, its beckoning ripples
making a milky blanket of the stitched
summer stars. In that reflection he could see
even the shapes of what was hiding
as his classmates stripped to skinny dip:
Glenn’s shame at his newly thickened torso;
how Janet stepped away from herself
in order to get down to little enough
not to be suspected of apprehension.
And his own slender shoulders unfurling
to wings that shuddered meekly beneath
his t-shirt. As if they had just been born.
Above their silhouettes a universe
was stanchioned patiently in the sky.
This he could see next to what was there
to see: the boulders holding stations
on the opposite shore; someone
slipping scared into the water like space.
Jess Williard is a poet and screenwriter from Wisconsin. His debut collection, Unmanly Grief (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), was selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Recent work appears in Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill, and The Gettysburg Review.
Read poetry by Jess Williard previously appearing in Terrain.org: three poems and two poems.
Header photo by Jens Zieschank, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Jess Williard courtesy Krowka Photography.
