Journeys Into the Countryside of the Dead

Abandoned Farmhouse:
The Long Waiting for Ruin and Wreckage

Memorial Days 

James Hart 

for Sharon Catlin Coleman, a prose poem

Time eats them all eventually, the houses of my memory gone year by hungry year. Most of them just slowly fold, disappearing into omnivorous earth marked by weedy drives and hollow stands of trees where a barn and asymmetrical emptiness hold the harvest of the years. Sometimes they fall to predatory storms, scavengers nosing their bony remains. A few find grace in salvage taken somewhere further down the road. Tabulating these former houses, another one down and gone, makes a mental calendar, a way of giving annual form to formlessness, as I drive out country roads to decorate my family’s dead where they lay in cemeteries bearing family or biblical names: Braden, Mt. Zion, Appleberry, and Ebenezer, my favorite name for its hard meaning: stone of help. Out of touch with generations, my fingertips trace their vanishing names eroding the older stones, victims of discerning water and digestive weather. My parents’ names more newly hewn will someday feed the cravings of a distant wind. My sons endure their strange pilgrimage across the countryside of the dead, requesting favorite family stories to help the car move more quickly along the miles as I tell myself I serve the replenished past for them. But I know it’s only my lonely hopefulness that these stones might flesh familiar bones, that houses might home us again, that time’s insatiability might turn to stone before it swallows my fading name. And so we take the fast road home under darkness sifting down from stars: my sons sensing this rhythm in their sleeping breathing, their heads resting and rocking with the car’s urgent pace, dreaming their ancestors’ feasted dreams.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead) 

Missouri Red Barn Ruins