They ate their silence from faithworn plates and spoons,
swallowing the forgiven coffee used twice
each day and aware of the greater trespass
they shared in this house which was their staybetween.
Cracked like their hands and cups, who knew when its seams
would give? In the fearwhile, the question unasked
kept their lips still, as though words tempted a risk
beyond their strength to mend should the seams be loosed.
The meal done, she freed the table from its chore
and brought him the county's weekly paper, their
footnotes to other people's answers and prayers,
then bent to her needlework, seeking accord.
Lost by, he stared unseeing at the words poured
through his eyes as though, shuttered against exposure,
the negative in his mind could be immured
in its acid and yet bring some meaning forth.
For a hurt away and far as a man might walk
on a friendly day to a neighbor's door, lay
Nielsen's farm, a credit to God had He made
it with His hands, but none to the man whose straw
grew luckside up as though his plow left a spore
of gold in every furrow. It was a trade
so many seasons back, the reasons became
changestricken at this stranger who sat absorbed.
Touched to the slow, Carl paused and tested the bowl
of his pipe, needing a valid doubt to prod.
Had he pawned his soul to find refuge in rocks
and let a waterfall drain in a sinkhole?
Through the smoke, he traced the wry and twisted road
down whenless years that had plunged him here to rot—
and yet, of Nielson he had required no bond
of hate, for this neither one had bought or sold.
Torrent to trickle, not friendship had reversed
the law, but an unnatural love of worm for bird,
of plant for weed, of a sterile man for Merle,
a woman he could not wed and mark as cursed
without destroying the very universe
that had mothered her and which she owed rebirth.
"You take the farm and Merle. I'll make my own world
over." The words had been all too well observed.
He had not known how close hell was to heaven,
not then and not while he lived in it alone,
watching Merle's seed grow beyond his graveyard slope
from buried dreams she never guessed were even
there, living as she did within her children's—
not until another came to share his ghost
and made him see that death was not like a coat
one wore and had mended by a wife named Jen.
All the thought round, he gnawed on the bitter rind,
hungerwhelmed for a taste of Nielsen's larder,
that orchard whose fruitening he had bartered
for peelings, and dry angered at the two mice
who squeaked in their chairs, each resigned
to his own corner of an empty cupboard,
but mostly ashamed because he could not convert
thorns into leaves, grapes from stones, thirst into wine.
He cleaned his parched pipe from its ashes and stood
to wind a watch with broken springs, setting it
for tomorrow when his shadow would be hitched.
"I'm turning in, Jen. You come before you cool."
His footsteps made the attic cling to the roof
as she folded her needlework's piece of silk
in a sewing box made like an infant's crib,
then raised herself and blew its darkness on the room.