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

Claire McQuerry is the author Lacemakers (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. She teaches at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.
Date Published: 2017-10-20
Source URL: https://poets.org/poem/meadow-hoarfrost