For the boy before us, forever’s flat, and everywhere he turns. And forever the fathers 
will be animated shadows, cardboard characters: brown-armed, lost in corn from dawn to gone 
light, alternating aftershaves like pretty Houston bankers, only here it’s gasoline/pesticide/
fertilizer/beer. Sundays the children sit united in their silence at the kitchen table as their father 
walks across the maple floors. The air that surrounds him sends down a whiff of his true skin: 
soapsweet, and going sour: they are his children: they want in.
	Now the land exhales, now the wave of summer lifts. Nightlong in wind the dead stalks 
click & bend and tomorrow that father, that half-mute two-footed presence, grunting, sopped, 
guides the stalling tractor across fall’s third hard rain, cleaving out a view the boy’s bones had 
not forgotten, soon mud, soon bugless/birdless black sea clotted & glazed by glare of sky.
	If clapboard were glass we’d see the father, in bed, staring skyward like a dead man, and 
the son, supine behind a common wall, staring too. If thoughts were scrawled across foreheads 
we’d read the mother’s face of hope: May the hard separate light that leaves the eyes of that man 
and his son unite and continue, dear Lord, to infinity.
	As for the son, he’s stunned by paternal silence, the lack of war. What have I done? New 
juices below the skin move in on him like dark clouds across the plain: the light of himself in the 
mirror is awful, overwhelms.
	Winter, when the day-wind blows with the scent of mountain, salt marsh, black hill, when 
the night-wind is a train that rolls around those hills and down and over, across the plain & the 
mud and slaps the house/rattles its frame and there’s too much noise too much now for the boy to 
hear his voice grow thunder, feel those dark hairs sprout, while ’til midnight the father, sullen in 
the shed, cleans the tiller-tines, lubricates the tractor, spits the mixed tobacco juice and beer.
	“Out here the angle of our stance against this land is true. Our stories, though half of them 
are lies, truer still.” This story’s simple, too, familiar. The son stands up to an inheritance of corn. 
At nineteen pulls the first silks down from his skin and in the mirror sees the new blue suit: 
Insurance. From Omaha to Denver, promotion, calling out like that Christmas wind. And in the 
beige motels he dreams of being held close by a figure without a face, wakes, fades back to 
dream of a nonexistent sister, wakes to leap from bed toward the 8 o’clock appointment, corn 
tongue hot & golden, selling policies, promotion Salt Lake, smell of new plastic in company 
cars, promotion Carson City, corn bones in the sunlight of new suits & the rattle of salaries, 
middle-aged manchild bending into wind, on his own, bleeding toward California.