Windmill Against a Winter Sky

Windmill and Winter Sky

On Stopping by My Home Place

After a Childhood Friend’s Funeral

James Hart

This is January-land where brown grass stems

spin their pathetic pun—What’s done is dun—

and the wind bewilders surface water, a million

lapping lips slipping toward a shore away from

me.  I listen for the play of children, three girls

and two boys parading trikes and a Red Flyer

in that lane over there forty years ago.  I hear

implacable years instead, as firm as the curl

of shoreline that harbors everything forgotten

here just below the water’s gray hypnotic drift.

That neighbor’s distant windmill whirling swift

in its blur should be the youngest of us then

pedaling his tricycle furiously in a gravel sky,

that scrim of cloud his cloud of dust that never

really flew from his whirling wheels no matter

how much the image suits my mood or memory.

Nor should I be standing here today, except

to pause and remember us then—five children

playing daily in the quarter-mile road that ran

along our farm’s western edge—for a windswept

moment I’d rid myself of funeral gloom I wear.

The wind is attended by soft undercurrent songs

below surface air, long resonant rememberings

rising from earth, harping at barbs of sagging wire,

and the wood of a crippled gate I lean against

tremors with swiftness from the south.  I’d chide

the neighbor’s cows if I could, for silence abides

with them as if they browse in dun fields fenced

by disappearances.  Here nothing remains I recall,

both houses gone, soundingboards of emptiness

thrumming where wind rubs them raw and lawless,

and only ghost children sleep at ease in their walls.

January 27, 2002

Testaments of Abandonment