Andrew Grace

Ones, Shook

after Mobb Deep

When I have fears that I might not live

as long as my father did

who died at 52

underneath his own truck

in the machine shed on the farm,

I try to focus on those I’ve already outlived.

Albert Ayler.  Jesus.  Roberto Clemente.

DJ Screw.  All of the Bronte sisters. 

Plath too, whose father died when she was 8,

as did John Keats’,

killed by his own horse.

Prodigy of Mobb Deep died at 42.

He often bragged about having no feelings.

I have too many.  I’m shaken

by the sight of a heron out of season,

by having to make telephone calls

and really any interaction

with others, by the memory of taking sandwiches

in the dark to my father in a tractor

because he didn’t want to stop harvesting.

I don’t want to outlive him

as some sort of victory.

The perfect world is not the one without death.

It’s one in which you know it’s coming

and bother to keep your whole body

laced up as if in a bodice

others must cinch behind you

until it hurts

so you can cherish for as long as possible

the work of keeping it together.

 

 

 

Will

I leave you the gaunt cow.

 

I leave you the drowned oats and no insurance.

 

I live in the latter age of the riots of prairie.

 

I leave you the cow that burned Chicago.

 

I want to get this straight.

 

I have never forgotten a single thing in my life.

 

I am the champion of scorched pans and cigarette smoke, the Whitman of Astroturf.

 

I leave you the cow that brained Hank Pfeffer.

 

I live where the used-to-be trees are worked over by a doubleness of crows.

 

I leave you capitulations of tractors without a shed.

 

I grow old in a house of dereliction: my microwave sparks like knocked flint and the radiator recites the Old Testament.

 

I pitchfork fodder in a barn vexed with toxins.

 

I leave you pig iron.

 

I leave you the green sky before the derecho.  

 

I leave you the white cow of the Resurrection.

 

I live where I cannot see another house, just the rumor of its lunatic rooster.

 

I leave you light like a nail in the head.

 

I leave you light like nettles whorled into a nest.

 

I haven’t left my homestead since before rust wrote its autobiography in blistered Braille across the water heater.

 

I leave you the asthma of the wet crow.

 

I live where a fugitive grapevine oozes its sugar onto the clotted dust.

 

I leave you the cow with eyes like the electrodes of a twelve-volt battery.

 

I am all honey and gristle.

 

I watch the grass luxuriate in its broth of chlorophyll.  

 

They said my eyes could spook the yard bald.

 

I live where the silo is a prison.

 

I leave you the cow of freedom.

 

The drought is here. 

 

I pour my shadow across the earth to slake its thirst.




Andrew Grace is the author of A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing), Shadeland (Ohio State University Press) and SANCTA (Ahsahta/Foundlings). His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review and New Criterion. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he is a Senior Editor at the Kenyon Review and teaches at Kenyon College. His fourth collection A Brief History of the Midwest is recently out from Black Lawrence Press.

Artwork: “Harvest” by Daniel Lurie

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