Boyhood
Was plans & hammers,
was drift logs, scavenged 1x8s, & a sack
of mismatched nails with which we
fashioned—because we
were boys & that’s what the book told us
boys did—a raft. Was us
jiggly-fleshed & shirtless, was bowl-cuts
& sunburn, was when with all the sorry strength
in us we oared the slough’s slow horseshoe
& sailed straight into snakegrass, cattails,
& waist-deep mud, where we foundered
& bemoaned our fate & abandoned
ship & all night, then, itched at the splinters
threading the backs of our thighs, the undersides
of our wrists, the weeping Os
along our bellies where leeches unskinned us
for the one sweetness in us.
Was when like leeches & mosquitoes we tasted
every new wound,
snorted the tumble of blood
right back up the mysteries
of the nostrils. Was when at chore time we hid
in the tall grass & horseweeds
behind the barn, laid down on our backs
& studied the high clouds for cracks, for a way
out. Was the highway singing its one dumb
song & the screen door scolding & the long, beautiful faces
of the fields whispering next year, next year. Was our fathers,
some fevered afternoon, saying to hell with it
& chunking their tools into buckets
& driving hell bent toward town, was the turnoff
where we waited—despite our mothers’
pleas & edicts—for hours,
just sat there in the dirt,
scrambling up now & again to piss in the sagebrush
or lip what flesh we could from a fistful
of chokecherries. Was when we would have waited forever
for the dark that was our fathers, for the stars
that were our fathers, for the dust
of the road to rise & tell us how the sky
might feel if we could hold it, even a moment,
in our hands.
Even Now It Is Inside of Me
Those winter evenings
when snowstorms
knocked out the power
we gathered at the kitchen table,
where in shadow my grandfather
lifted the glass chimney
& lit the oil lamp. Like the oil,
I trembled. Like the wick,
I cleanly burned. How dark
it was outside. How close
we were in that light. How quiet.
In the Ninth Year of Dought
Cottonwoods shed dead limbs.
The river dries down to an alkali track.
East of town someone’s tailpipe sparks a grass fire.
Smoke rises black as oiled barn staves.
Smoke for a moment in the true shape of a good barn.
My grandmother wires her heart to an artesian well.
I thin my eyes at the tomcats.
They’re hogging all the shade.
Afternoons the little neighbor girl strips down to underoos.
Fills her sandbox with hosewater.
As if from the mudded earth we could refashion what we’ve lost.
A river a ditch a field of anything.
Pretend she says this is a field of wheat.
A Mountain Away
When I think of us now I think of Old Divide
Road, which even all those years ago
was just gravel giving way to dry grass
& the dull, floury dust beneath our bootsoles as I
held your waist & you my shoulders & we
turned awkwardly & without
music through moonglow & starshine, turned
such that someone a mountain
away might look & smile,
think, they’re dancing,
might against the milky, midnight light
shadow their eyes & say,
no, wait, they’re tamping the dirt down,
they’re burying something.
Joe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana and now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. He is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which have garnered wide critical acclaim. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of a GLCA New Writers Award, and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. You can find him online at joewilkins.org and joewilkinswriter.substack.com.Read poetry by Joe Wilkins previously appearing in Terrain.org: three poems, four poems, four poems, two poems, two poems, and two poems. And read “Kids Like This,” an excerpt of The Entire Sky, as well as Joe’s Letter to America, “New Names.”
Header photo by Zurijeta, courtesy Shutterstock.
