Walking Through My Father's Fields, Home

Walking Through My Father’s Fields, Home

The windows creaked from the heat
the day they bundled my mother up
and hauled her off
like an old Christmas tree,
taking only a couple of suitcases
and her sickness with her;
this dying stranger
who hadn't left the house
since before I could remember,
and whom I'd sat watch over
for more than my 15 years –
watched her whither
like a lake bed, until I was sure
there was nothing left of her but dust.

Dad said,
“We’re taking her to the hospital.”
I pulled on pants good enough for town,
and shoes,
as my father and brother led her
out the door,
half the time carrying her
and her confused moans
to the old International truck.
I climbed in the back.

My father drove faster than usual,
which still wasn't very fast,
past the barn, the sheds and tractors,
the fields.
I heard my brother say that the silage
looked sparse,
and my father, that it'd gotten
scorched by the drought
and we'd be lucky if it lasted the cows
through winter.
I scanned the yellow blighted field
and nodded as we rattled

down the long gravel road
peopled by cows that'd jumped the fence
which we didn’t stop for. I watched them
grow small and quiet behind us
until the trees gave out, and the gravel
turned into asphalt with a bump.
The fields became houses.

The edge of our land bordered
the county hospital.
We pulled into the cracked and ugly asphalt
parking lot and waited
while Dad went to get an orderly.
Behind us stretched corn –
I could barely make out the cows
grazing in the field – and beyond that
the road, then the pasture,
and hills. Somewhere back there
was the house,
just a mile or so away.

I turned back to the truck
as they came for her.
My brother walked over to me
and pointed off to the south
to the nursing home
they'd just built on a corner
of layout ground that used to be ours.
That’s where they'd take her
when she was all checked in, he meant.

We'd brought her into town
so she could die proper.
If she made it through the year,
she'd be able to see
our winter wheat outside her window
and maybe think of home.
“Dad’s finishing it all up,”
my brother said, “we can go.”
I nodded and glanced at the truck.

Instead, we walked to the barbed wire fence,
which was overgrown with a wall of trees
and weeds.
We scaled it and plodded through
the still young corn,
not speaking, growing slowly separate
as we spread out to drive the cows
back to pasture.

C.D. Bledsoe

Posted over on his site, Murder Your Darlings
Cortney commented:
(Originally appeared in Lifelines, 2004, I think)

Notes: Another one from Miller Williams' class. I was told, by my classmates, that this isn't a poem because it's too long. I was also told that narrative is dead in poetry. Maybe this is true. But artists can't be zebras--blending in is safe, but it dooms you to obscurity. I actually cut a page or so from it. My classmates asked me not to submit anything else in the class after this one. It was approaching finals time, and I'd made my required submissions for the class. I believe the next week I turned in two poems. Like I've said, I applauded honest effort in the work of others, but I've always abhored laziness.

Chris Fullerton, who was in the class, and I looked the other day to see if we could find any publications from anyone else from that class. We found a technical writer and one guy who wrote a fictional biography of an obscure musician. Kind of sad. I wonder if they even read anymore.

I learned a lot from Miller Williams and in spite of many of my classmates. By the following year I was getting work published in nationally recognized journals. I will never forget when I had poems picked up by Nimrod, my first real publication, and Skip Hays (the Creative Writing guru of U of A) shook my hand and started introducing me to the grad. students and faculty. I was on staff of the school's literary journal that year as well. This caused a couple of my old classmates to no longer speak to me. It was around this time I began to realize why they had such animosity towards me. My buddy Jake Swearingen summed it up best: "I try to avoid other writers," I believe was the line.

So I've been working on Riceland for around a decade, but only seriously for about half that time. Since I started writing these poems (and I pretty much always envisioned them as a collection) I've written and published two other collections, completed a third, and the bulk of a fourth, aside from all the fiction, nonfiction, etc. But I kept plugging away on Riceland. I'm nervous about it. I want it to be perfect. It's not and never will be. But I've sat on it long enough. It's scheduled to come out this fall.