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Authors: Devin Johnston

Far-Fetched

BOOK: Far-Fetched
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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Epigraph

Ameraucana

Above Ivanhoe

Far-Fetched

The Clyde

A Fly from the Early Anglers

Shrooms

Puffball

Saturday Morning

Geode

The Southern

A Close Shave

Orpingtons

New Song

Syrinx

Telephone

Tempers

Circle Line: London

Two from Catullus

Bright Thorn

Gloss

Visiting Day

Fixed Interval

Means of Escape

Strangers

Night and Day

Owl-Eyed

The Sudden Walk

Turned Loose

Want

School Days

Late October

Leaving Home

Come and See

Small Triumphs

In Search of Mulloway

Sailing under Storm

Silver

Ting

Scavenger

Satin Bowerbird

Acknowledgments

Also by Devin Johnston

Copyright

 

From hence the River fetches a large Winding …

—Benjamin Martin

AMERAUCANA

Well, Sally Hen, how do you like your home?

A straight run from the east to the west

with hardscrabble fit for a choral dance

and overhead, a walnut tree,

lord of ice and obstacles.

In the morning dark or dusk of an afternoon,

you softly cluck, then settle down

to roost in mercury-vapor light

with spring behind your lids.

At its first true intimations,

you bend on backward knees

to crop a tussock of cloverleaf,

raising a lateen tail above the trough.

Tufted auriculars disregard

horn and drums, mahogany tones

of a tenor deep within the house,

but not the soft chromatic descent

of snowmelt, or a breath of wind.

From a fallow bed, so much undone,

your parched and reptilian cry proclaims

a perfect form of incompletion:

first egg of the year.

ABOVE IVANHOE

Above Ivanhoe and Fries,

blues dissipate the ridge

as rain comes

wrapped in itself.

Pull the curtain so I can sleep.

A colt's tail drags a scuff,

a handbreadth of cloud

skiffing across the gap,

its wake a drow of cold breath,

a mug of dirty light, tipping out

reflections from a daguerreotype,

smur that deepens and deepens,

turning as smoothly as dusk

from mull to rug

bickering on the chimney cowl.

Socked in, you lie awake

inside a steady rustle,

a sound as dull

and absorbing as paper.

The general condition

leaves a thousand tokens,

hissing in the grate,

swamping the clay chimneys

crayfish make in secret hollows,

lifting oil from asphalt

on the road to Poplar Camp,

dripping from the eaves

of Boiling Springs Baptist Church,

rattling down through

long-abandoned lead mines.

Light pursues each instance,

catching what it can.

A frog pond of pewter.

The dull shine of hair.

At the ferry crossing,

broad and shallow,

a chain still glints

beneath the spangled current.

Later, along the ridge,

a few lamps shine

through tent canvas,

the woods around them writhing.

FAR-FETCHED

Six hundred feet above the dam at Fries

a stony pasture buckles across the top

and dips toward Austinville.

In a kettle, buzzards

glide at ease

on the river's steam,

up and up

through clockwise turns until

they catch a whiff of rot

and give chase

at a tightrope-walking pace,

no hurry, prey already caught.

Vibrations carry the faintest ring

of metal struck on metal, a cattle bell,

a corrugated pipe

through which a breath

might oscillate and sing,

a rough staccato

bark or yell,

faint as the
chip chip chip

sweet-sweet-sweet sweeter-than-sweet

from a yellow warbler's throat.

An engine flutters, remote,

and the crunch of gravel softens in retreat.

Two horses, hard to bridle, watch the road.

Another sleeps in shade beside a shed,

hock-deep in poison ivy.

Among its vines

bedsprings corrode

and blacksnake

breeds with copperhead.

You seen a river puppy,

down by the waterside?

They got the teeth of chillern

and fur that fire can't burn,

but human reek they can't abide.

As gravel thins, the road becomes a track

that climbs through cloud and sunlight, lead and zinc.

The ruts have overgrown

and cede to scrub,

with no way through or back.

At this remove

a couch and a kitchen sink

have come to rest where thrown

in thick Virginia poke,

far from any route

you'd take in setting out

from Bristol, Boone, or Roanoke.

THE CLYDE

We took your name from firth and river

that you might go forth and meander

from narrow waters of your birth

across the surface of the earth

and take such windings to and fro,

each scribble unconstrained yet slow,

each stroke and shallow stream of babble

transumptive, metonymical,

the idle tracing of a mood

with purposeless exactitude

that curls now on a backward course

and almost seems to reach the source

but turns away eventually

to join the firth and open sea.

A FLY FROM THE EARLY ANGLERS

In August, on a hot day,

walk by the Tweed and mark what falls

on the water, in some quiet place,

beneath a bridge, above a bed

of sand or gravell, wherever a Trout

lies boldly gleaming neer the top

and keeps watch for a wrinckle

betwixt him and the skie.

Take a brass-plate winding reele,

and for your line, five horses hayres,

and for your flye, a Cloudie Darke

of wooll clipt from betweene the eares

of sheepe, and whipt about with silk,

his wings of the under mayle of the Mallard,

his head, made black and suitable,

fixed upon a peece of corke

and wrapt so cunningly round the hooke

that nothing could betray the steele

but a hint of poynt and beard.

At no time let your shadow

lye upon the water

or cause a stone to clap on stone.

Be stil, and smoothly draw your flye

to and fro in a kind of daunce

as if it were alive.

SHROOMS

He learned to read before the rest of us

and rose to the highest stream by six,

a reedy laugh above the din of voices.

Before dawn, waiting for the bus,

he stooped to pluck a shaggy parasol

and offered it to me, a boutonniere

from the wrong kingdom, a different form of life.

I didn't know him well, you understand.

At fifteen, but for an earthy musk

and army coat, he left the world

and entered a circle of silence.

Survived by delivering pizzas, dealing pot.

Prepared nothing, confiding in no one,

why I never knew, with none to ask.

After twenty years, I could still find him

living here, lodged in his mother's basement,

shooting pool and breathing through his gills,

inhaling the base notes of wet dog,

woolen afghan, and stale tobacco.

Small fears bloom through lethargy

like mushrooms through their universal veils.

Should he emerge from his cul-de-sac

and over Silas Creek, autumnal sunlight

snapping at his face, caught in his lashes,

he might well give a sign of recognition,

tipping a phantom cap sardonically

with the furtive look of a poacher on his rounds.

PUFFBALL

Beside a richly

rotting oak

a moon fruits forth,

a tender moon

about the size

of a human head,

of the earth

yet nothing like it.

If you pass

this way at dusk,

bring it home

in a paper bag,

light and full

as a thought bubble,

enough, enough

to displace

whatever you had

in mind.

SATURDAY MORNING

Regret the time

wasted on work

which finds you

even here

but not hachures

of steep ascent

or the unremitting need

for learning facts

and calculating

unresolved events

ripples at the edge

of an ancient sea

Liesegang rings

from water and iron

corrugations

of unclenched surface

graffiti

light as lines

from a graphite pencil

scribbled around

a medallion of lichen

absorbing the sun

Wind and rain

go on eroding

hoodoo from bluff

the mutable form

of horse or mushroom

loaf or anvil

a cloven god

unresolved

and self-absorbed

in slow collapse

back to the clastic bed

and hoof clatter

just beyond

an ice sheet's

leading edge

GEODE

In a farmhouse at dusk,

a young girl sorts her rocks

and stores them in a cardboard box

where they nestle in tissue paper,

at rest from erosion.

Her fingers, soft as tissue,

lift and turn a geode

(the accident of epochs)

as if it were an egg.

BOOK: Far-Fetched
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