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Meadow with Hoarfrost

Now the wire is bare; now it's sheathed 
in blackbirds, a magic that undoes me 
every time: how they alight or rise 
like iron filings drawn by a magnet. 
What purpose to this synchronous eruption
 
but beauty? And yet, beneath such wonder,
what horrors bulge up out of the given. Take
that afternoon when, still shaken from it all
I cooked a funeral meal. Blind bars of sun
laced the counter, the cold, ground meat 
 
I rubbed with herbs and salt. I knew my friend 
wouldn’t taste, if he even ate, but the task 
gave me reason not to be still with the recent 
spectacle: the casket, his son’s body dressed 
as if for a school dance, the wrecked wrists
 
hidden beneath sleeves. If I’d let it, the specters
would split and split, like nesting dolls. Behind 
that impression, another—the ashes of a friend 
who’d hanged himself the month before. How, 
when cast, some of those ashes returned 
 
and clung to my sweater. The washed-up bones 
of the schizophrenic girl who’d walked into the river 
that summer. This was reality: the raw meat, 
my hands the same dull red, the drought scorching 
the heartland’s cornfields to straw, everything wasted. 
 
And yet, seasons flicker past like slides, a long
line of traffic, going whether I watch or not, so look: 
here I am, driving fast down a white highway. 
The fields shine in their netting of frost, and every 
last filament on every tree lining the road is plated 
 
meticulous silver—not a branch untouched—
and these witless blackbirds rise, making 
a sailing vessel of wings: you were wrong, says 
the ship that’s not a ship, that disappears 
into fog, wrong about everything.
 

Copyright © 2015 by Claire McQuerry. “Meadow with Hoarfrost” originally appeared in Poetry Northwest. Reprinted with permission of the author.

More by Claire McQuerry

Your Friendly Bank Is Offering

a life loan, the right blue dream
home, the ownership you deserve,
 
the industry to preserve. The providers help
you want it. We mortgage you “yes” and flex-
 
best-ible. One proud customer at a time.
That’s American wisdom: easier,
 
more of everything. Everyone deserves
the encore, a raise, respect, results, whatever
 
dream of local achieve. Purchase it, being.
Proud sponsor of do-done-faster, we
 
service new solutions, right answers.
We power your expectations of making,

dreams of shade-covered _ _ _ _ _ _.
Employees dedicate themselves to

the World's fulfilling, the family way. Know
the conforming American gets the mortgage.

Dream easier. Dream of good. Dream
today's/tomorrow's guaranteed lead.

Common solutions have purchase. Done it.
Un. Non. All dreams will chip.

Stratigraphy

Take what’s unearthed—copper, bone
needle, silver coins—as evidence of continuous
human presence. Such puzzling
detritus and handiwork: this bronze 
ear pick etched with fine cross-hatch or that 
female figurine of painted clay, “meaning 
unknown,” striped and small enough 
a child’s hand could enclose it. They look as if
laid aside yesterday, tokens of commerce
or devotion. Bronze stem of a mirror, 
pottery shards which conceal a partial 
story: the hands of Paris presenting the apple 
to Aphrodite. Another unknown woman 
flanks the goddess, but only her feet 
and robes remain. How much is unrecoverable,
how much surmised. Dig until you find 
a comb, further down an amphora’s handle, 
a seal. Here’s sign of fire, here 
erosion, here time
piling its jewels and ash, spreading
its quilts over the dead.
 

Related Poems

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

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