Plainsong
A poem by J.P. Grasser.
Hotter days than ever curl the paint
from the barn’s broadside, if not from the same loafing shed
where our ladders and stepladders fold in
on themselves, but even now, it’s endless,
rolling distance, that familiar wavering
where road crosses
road—which way?—out
of signal with no sign
to lean on, but the pastures, they do end.
So, enough. Enough with this kingdom
of pure loneliness wherein certain grace
certainly lies. Enough wielding
fields of the seeming-particular—sandberg
bluegrass, american sloughgrass, nutsedge, mullen,
needleandthread—for no name can contour
flatlands like these, locked in heat. See, a cloud is,
by nature, deliberation. A decade
looking for you in the inkblots
spreading a leopard
frog’s back is what I spent, then lo, lo
and behold, out of the blue arrives a text
with plenty to glean on cruciform structures
in plant DNA, which neared
the feeling, I guess, I guess it did, but to think
of what I most wanted and what I loved most
swept to one side, and to consider you
neck-deep in switchgrass and strangletop
makes nothing happen at all. To look at it
now, you’d never guess, but two horses lived
behind this old house, one grulla and one tobiano,
who made a kind of plain music, at dusk, swishing flies
from each other’s eyes and whickering after the good,
sweet hay, for whom dust was dirt and what dies doesn’t.
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, J.P. Grasser holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, where he edited Quarterly West. He lives in Montana's Bitterroot Valley and serves as an associate editor for 32 Poems.
