Taste
of cider, of almonds.
Touch of cinnamon and
entire acres turn the color of questions we
won’t answer tonight.
Who hallowed these halls out of
hollowed jack-o-lanterns?
Who
planked together a church out of wind and
the scent of rotted apples?
We peer into the living, the
rooms of a family who believes the body is the
cross we’re redeemed on.
We leave a cider mill full
of any smell an apple can be pressed into. When
red leaves eddy back to the branches that
drop them and our last thought is
omen, when a shadow stuffed into flannel and
roped to a fencepost wards off the will to use
words like right now, this world is love, how
can I not believe the crows are units of love cawing
it to straw? When barns
full of moon bounces stable
inflatable cows in whose bellies every child in
town now tumbles, how is this not a farm where
the moon is milked?
Tonight, as we
beat mazes through its fields, who wouldn't pluck
their shadow from a stalk and husk it?
Benjamin Goldberg lives with his wife outside Washington, D.C. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Greensboro Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salt Hill, The Southeast Review, Devil’s Lake, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2012 Gearhart Poetry Prize, the 2013 New Millennium Writings Award for Poetry, and the 2013 Third Coast Poetry Prize. He teaches high school English. Find him online at www.benrgold.com.
| If after reading this poem you Google “Montpelier Farms in Upper Marlboro, Maryland,” you will see one of the poem’s last images in the search return. It will be smiling at you, just as I couldn’t help smiling as I watched my two year-old nephew see it for the first time. From the moment we arrived, I could feel the inner stirrings that herald the creation of a poem. Many of the initial words and images did not survive my revisions, but I resolved when I started writing this poem that its final incarnation would include the word “love.” |
