FORREST PRITCHARD

I’ve been eating bread and
Honey mostly lately,
Cat hair on the counter
Where my shedding twins

Know not to hop—
But more specifically
Know not to hop
When I’m watching.

I clean and I tidy,
Do yoga daily,
Tend to the farm.
Days of growing revelation:

On the Appalachian Trail,
Raven Rocks, near Bluemont
Virginia, peeing into a
Thicket of witch hazel

I find the man with eyes
That show the skies straight
Through him. He stops, a
Through-hiker seeing

Connection, his square-shaped
Pack blackly looming like
The backdrop of a theatre:
“I’ll tell you a joke,”

He begins, “It’s one I tell
Every day-hiker I encounter.”
Yes, he actually said encounter.
The man then tells a joke

I shall not repeat here.
It wasn’t very funny.
Don’t think, I thought, proceeding,
Recalling his red beard

Swaying thick as a fox’s tail,
The way he grasped my eyes,
Seizing them without hesitation.
Truth! Truth! Maya Angelou

Wrote, When someone shows
You who they are, believe
Them the first time. It
Strikes me to believe him

Like I believe the slaty rocks, the
Long-winged caddis, the loblolly
Pine with windswept branches, spelling
Words I can read without knowing

Their definitions. Look for yourself.
From behind, far away now,
You see the through-hiker kneeling
At the stony trailhead, stooping

For packets of salmon, crackers,
Dehydrated potatoes left by angels,
Or perhaps simply people who will laugh at
His jokes, even when they’re not funny.

The girl who went adventuring
Picked up her heart one day
Where she had stored it in the pantry
And placed it in her pocket.

Out by the river she floats
Through the bluebells marveling,
Spicebush, sassafras, vaguely
Thinking, “Have I ever seen a paw paw?”

No matter. So many thorns to catch
On her clothing, so many sticks
To dig at the fabric of her dress—
Hands, pulling her back. Oh no,

She will not be held! She moves on,
Beneath sycamores sweeping,
An infinity of blue sky beyond.
How is it empty pockets now bulge,

Filled with interesting stones? When
Did her feet became muddy,
Her ankles scratched and weeping
With cuts? But she notices none of

These things, notices nothing, save
The sparkling sunlight on the
Shenandoah, the osprey’s great wings
Spanning bank to bank, the

Delicate shadows beneath the ivy,
And the miraculous sound of traffic
Far in the distance, where she knows life
Proceeds, whenever she someday returns.

The fence in the woods
Has finally fallen,
Propped all this time by
The sinewed remains of
Honeysuckled deer bones,
Single mistimed leaps
Where, twisting, twisting,
The leg at last is liberated
And the carcass molders to
Apatite and phosphate,
Bowled into the lap of soil.

Have you followed these fences
Too? Rusted intent, its barbed
Wire poised to puncture actual
Air. Run your palm along its
Flaking length, gentle spasms
Of corrosion. Our eyelids twitch
Sometimes with the same tender
Entropy. Potassium. Nitrogen,
Fixed from the pregnant breath
Of exhaled leaves, fecund,
Each footstep breathing sighs.

Hungry jellied mouths
Orangely supping, conical
Fungi where the farmer mis-
Skinned the bark from the post,
And lichen pulps the locust.
Push, and it yields—the crescent
Earth gasping plain surprise.
Hydrogen. Sulphur. Nothing
Much pondered during
The building of fences,
Where the digging iron

Strikes stones, quartz-
Veined limestone, fissile shale
Slick with micas, throwing
Bright sparks extinguished
The instant they ignite. Friable,
Such afternoons squandered—
The trunks subsuming wire,
Dutifully swallowing it whole,
Straightening dappled light
Into inconsolable lines
Divided, willful calumny.

Ain’t nothing straight:
This farm house
Bain to masons;
The jigsawed barn
Anathema— in 2007
A one-footed carpenter
Threw his hammer over
The hill, and I found
It years later
Ensconced with rust;
In 1999, the Venetian
Complimented the fence rows—
So straight, so precise—
Ignoring the rolling hills.
The wind? Not straight neither,
Combing the fields into
Parts: left, right, backwards,
Cowlicked. What kind of place,
Where the walnuts wend
Wayward, and the spring
Trickles at turns silver,
Opaque, translucent, its
Fish free to fly to the
Shenandoah, Potomac,
Chesapeake—triangulated,
Just as rivers run straight!

I’ve seen nothing straight—
My sister, the one who
Reads Emily Post, shows me
Her her crooked fingers,
Bent now at the
Knuckle below the nail.
It’s a syndrome, she says.
I remember in 1984
When she bought a
Purple Rain poster,
Hanging it on her West
Virginian wall.
Holy, this disobedience!
Even the pious,
Bent at the knee,
Flip to the page
The priest instructs.
So much flipping—
So much rise and sit,
Fall, and arise! But
Across the open pasture,
Spiraled sunshine streams
Forth—touching nothing as
It passes near,
Around,
And almost straight through.