Abandoned Truck in a Field
This ’72 Chevy Cheyenne belongs to God and bird
lime and decades of stray shotgun blasts.
The hay field belongs to crickets and chiggers
and a lazy diamondback with a sweet tooth
for baby gophers. The mind of the man
who sits in the truck belongs to mild Alzheimer’s
and the linguistic gumbo of a stroke
eight years back. The rest of him belongs
to overalls and Meals on Wheels—also to a few
stealth neighbors like me and a grandniece who lives
above his garage and counts his pills like an abacus.
And don’t forget Maggie—his dead wife
who makes appearances in a certain gingham
house dress Sunday afternoons. These scraps of fog
belong to the Jurassic by way of the Anthropocene,
thus encouraging us to believe in mysticism
again—here a diddly ghost, there a diddly ghost.
Seems we all want to be haunted by something.
The Canada geese overhead haunted
by their own honks as they arrow south to Baja.
The binocs I’m glassing the field with haunted
by faith, a pair of old-school Bushnells
on loan from my father till the Morning
of the First Resurrection. And not a moment
longer. Is belong the right word? The farmer’s
arm, held out the window just so, as if making
a left turn at the third moon of Jupiter,
is gravitas and arthritis and oats in his palm.
And his cupped hand is an open invitation
to palm readers everywhere. Yes belong.
And now, as if on cue, this Appaloosa,
the only horse in the field, draws near—a snuffling
methane machine hungry for grain. Look
at her nuzzle in. She belongs to his arm
and he belongs to her spots the way my happy
fatigue in watching belongs to the trembling now.
