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

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