“Slow Barbour kicks the stand of his scooter
down”
Slow Barbour kicks the stand of
his scooter down
And throws the monkey-ball yet to
fall into my glove
Where Rose catches the pig in the
Pasture’s periphery.
Brown kills the one squirrel,
Daddy daring to pay him a dollar, if he could “hit one”:
“Here’s your squirrel, he was
snickering at me, now gimme my dollar.”
Daddy: “You’re mine and the squirrel’s mine.”
He would say also to Rose, “You
and the pig’s mine,”
“Mine,” the farm intact, an
attitude,
The fields fallow mostly, the
farmers, gone,
The Hands, Whites and Blacks, who
swapped work.
The old house I was born in,
restored, here on this hill!
Ashley Langdon: master-builder, the creek’s cabin-boy.
The beaver’s damned huts, the
sourwood of Cow Mire, and the branch itself
Run the history of the place,
going back into the 18th century
When Solomon Stephenson II
settled on Middle Creek,
Leaving his greatgrandfather,
grandfather, and father in Isle of
Wight −
John I and John II and Solomon I
− who started the Ste(v)ensons out in
America,
The line coming on down to me
through Solomon I’s son,
This Solomon II, acquiring land
in 1767 by land-grant, Johnston
County, right here −
And fathering David I, who begat
my greatreatgrandpap George, who begat Manly,
Who begat George William, who
begat Paul, S R, who fathered me −
The birds − eastern king,
cowbird, buzzard, crow, bluebird, downy, hairy,
Carolina wren,
Hermit thrush, starling, martin,
great-crested flycatcher, titmouse, house-sparrow,
Field-sparrow, white-throated
sparrow, song sparrow, house finch, purple finch,
Chipping sparrow, snowbird,
butcher-bird (loggerhead shrike), mockingbird,
Orchard oriole, catbird (don’t
see hardly any anymore),
Cedar waxwing (my father called
the “rice” bird), jaybird, redbird, summer tanager,
Goldfinch, flicker, pileated
woodpecker, meadowlark.
Dogs grace the logs of Paul’s
Hill, barking and chasing the horn, the fox alone.
In the Preserves taped voices of
dogs jump the gray or red and the race is on −
Jayboy, Butler, Tony, Blue,
Atlas, Sing, Boogie, Slobber Mouth, Fancy, Fanny,
Suzie, Rock, Ginger (for Rogers),
Bette (Davis), Bing (Crosby), Bob (Hope).
My 1950’s childhood drifts under
the chainey-tree while Mama’s suds
Crawl up her arm and come on her
elbows in hums
The trees themselves (sourwood
and southern oak, red oak and maple)
Lean toward rivers
(Neuse, Pamlico,
Cape
Fear).
Crops? Cotton, corn, tobacco (of that six-weeks
hell),
Peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes,
collards, turnips − peas.
O to make a life a poem on a
Christmas not yet come!
To see the big tree in the living
room one more time:
Mama makes snow out of
corn-starch.
She gets bulbs and the big cords
out of the box.
The star itself scrapes the
ceiling.
I peek sideways through a crack
and see a real one.
Sweetgum balls we wrap in
tin-foil, ornaments out of the woods:
holly branches.
My father rests the axe on his
right shoulder.
His hunting-jacket smells like a
fresh-caught rabbit.
I see the red blobs in the
field-pouch, the dried blood.
I am scared Jesus might come,
really appear, in my sleep.
One night in a scream I tell
Mama
I see Him (my sister Rose brings
home a veil of His face hidden somewhere in the cloth).
I see it in the middle room from
my brother’s and my doublebed.
And I am afraid the sermons my
grandfather preaches come true.
The poem warms the stars
And scatters pieces around my sleep, my arm
across my forehead
The way my mother slept with hers across her
head.
My school comes together from one through
twelve.
The grades blur in chalk on the
tree.
Called it the “eraser-tree” and the
“vaccination-tree”
(We lined up there for our shots).
Our Christmas-tree stand (two
narrow planks nailed in a cross)
And the pasteboard box tied up
with one of Mama’s holey stockings
We store on a shelf in the
packhouse.
I put out buttermilk, cookies,
too, and cake Mama makes.
I fall asleep, my brother and me,
And we get up once and see a body
rolled-up in a blanket.
Oh just a tent!
We lived in the woods: I know not why we would want to camp
out.
How my body ached for
Christmas!
Jesus never came and the preachers preached
on and the people cried as relatives died.
The graves opened final
journeys.
The stars brightened for promises the season
would shoot the moon,
My 12-gauge Iver-Johnson blasting my
ears.
I thought my father would not want Uncle
Reuben to give me the money to buy that gun.
I swear I saw fluffs of cloth where Santa
went up the chimney!
I taste the vanilla
flavoring,
Hear farmers come by for a
nog.
The drunk appears, musses Daddy’s
hair and says O Paul O
Paul
And Daddy says, “Go on home.”
The blade curves slightly from
chopping hills and hills of cotton, the helve smooth,
The past propped away in the arms
of the hoers resting
Momentarily in the sun, the
cotton-sprouts, little clover-looking, green things.
The choppers and weeders,
loitering, ogle skyward,
The young corn-tassels, not
curled yet.
Tobacco-plants green and fuzz the
fields: Five-Acre, Ten,
Potato-Patch,
Old Place Front, Gnat Field, The
Rocky Hillside-bottom.
Truck-farm crops: potatoes, peanuts, peas, collards,
turnips, cukes,
Squash, cabbage, okra,
butterbeans, watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes.
Hands sweat and cure the
handles,
The women in their hats tied
rakishly on with rags, the babies on pallets,
The conversation, vulgar and
serious, too,
The carrying-on to get through,
the hoe, king and queen,
The goose-necked tip curved from
the helve’s working end.
The wheelbarrow’s filled with mud
at the chimney for the plankhouse.
The hoe’s like a tongue in a
groove, cement hardening around the thin, flat blade,
The long handle set to cut
through the mud before it sets.
Mortar for the bricks Ashley and
I have picked from an old homestead.
Darkness sends the grassers and
weeders home.
Birds find their roosts.
The frost, tentative, brings out
the insects.
Tomorrow the blue birds will
clean them up.
Sedge serves the pasture.
The Angus announce.
My brother washes Lady’s bag,
squeezes her pinkish tits.
The white stream squirts and
pings the side of the bucket,
Lady’s nose in the tub, the
bottom pooched out from her tongue’s
Hunger, her tail twitching like
mini-whips, noises flying buzzes round an odor
Unmistakably like molasses on a
table laden with buttermilk biscuits made with lard.
She’s tied to a chain on a stake
she’ll circle, the links, taut.
That man at the gallows, masked
in black, eyes, coal-chunks, seizes the blade.
One more dead.
Whose blood drips first to turn
to this?
The sharpened weapons the
ministers disgrace.
In soft garments piped with roses
kings and queens lie in graves.
Dictators tumble like cats in the
weeds.
Tufts of grass spring outside
Dachau.
A man clasps a lever.
A cramped hand bleeds.
There is a new stream in Cow
Mire.
I think it is the heart of the
forest.
I do not want to leave.
Each little trickle reminds me of
the swish of the hoe
Or the women with freshly-washed
hair, throwing strands from side to side in the sun.
That look in their eyes I like
the most.
I throw the hoe across my
shoulder and we walk the path
Down under the southern oak, its
muscles outspread,
Through the hollies and cedars
into the deeper woods.
The sun needles shadows.
A grape-vine in a fence-corner
stops the choppers.
The helves become stakes for
tomato-plants.
My mother celebrates the hoe.
Her shape bends in my eyes.
She could be a hoe with special
lights that see into things,
Poking and patting there among
the okra.
She stands her hoe up straight, a
clump of dirt holding it.
Spirit weeds what she’s done all
her life,
Saying, “Don’t you think it’s
time for some singing.”
Shelby Stephenson's Play My Music Anyhow is forthcoming from
Finishing Line Press.
