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 be
tweene 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.
For her, the stone is new.
THE SOUTHERN
An oval fob of brass,
key still attached,
surfaced in a shop on Cherokee
and now rests atop my desk
beside a small obsidian axe.
Absently, I rub my thumb
across the fob and feel
Southern Hotel, Room 306.
The elegant lobby survives
in a few steel engravings:
palms and spindleback chairs,
fruit in thick cut glass,
men loafing in spats.
One of them slips next door
for a quick nip
and winds up slugging down
half a dozen oysters the size of eggs,
rummaging through the shells.
Amidst the bright din
of cutlery and chatter,
the whiskey—a second, then a third—
encourages equilibrium,
then a calm indifference.
The evening sun goes down,
drawing river smells
through shadows of the Sixth Ward,
blushing the hotel’s stone façade,
enflaming its westward-facing rooms.
Behind the front desk, a plaque
commemorates Chief Pontiac,
leader of the Ottawa
and great friend to Louisiana,
buried in a blue coat
beyond the cemetery gates,
no one knows quite where.
A CLOSE SHAVE
From Baden, or what’s left of it,
pursue a long, smooth curve of road
that skirts the northern flood wall
to parallel a palisade
of channel markers sunk in earth,
the folly of a cement works.
Its blank silos overlook
a pit of argillaceous shale,
the fine and fossilized remains
of bivalves, sponges, spines of shark,
quarried and burnt with limestone charge
to alchemize a binder of brick
and the city’s shallow, brittle crust.
Around a bend, the riverbed
swings wide to open a fetch of field.
Shadows skim its mucky thaw
as juncos, whisked about by the wind
on courses neither fixed nor free,
give but a quick metallic chink.
Behind you, rain has wrapped the bluffs
and scumbled limbs of sycamores.
Ahead, each bend assumes the name
of a gaudy packet run aground,
or snagged and sunk, or blown to bits:
for one, the side-wheel Amazon,
pluperfect wheelhouse painted green,
that struck a honey-locust pike
still rooted deep in river mud
and tore its hull from stem to stern.
Down in minutes! Within the month
an island silted up behind.
A flock of luggage floated south,
remarked by those on Water Street
loafing before the trading post
and the barbershop of Madame Krull.
She can eternally be found
at work in her elaborate room
toujours prête to clip and coif
or wield her razor with great skill
for those who favor her with their chins.
The scent of ginger tonic blends
with that of borscht, its acrid tang,
consumed behind a wooden screen
as Illinois grows dark. In this,
her second year since coming west.
ORPINGTONS
A pair of Orpingtons,
one blue, the other black,
with iridesce
nt necks
and fine, ashen fluff
cackle through the dark,
their damp calls close enough
to chafe, a friction with no spark.
They settle down to roost,
two rests along a stave.
Each curls into itself,
comb tucked beneath a wing,
as the days grow long enough
to kindle in each a yolk,
the smallest flame of spring.
NEW SONG
after William IX, Duke of Aquitaine
As sweetness flows through these new days,
the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase
in neumes of roosted melody
incipits to a new song.
Then love should find lubricity
and quicken, having slept so long.
The bloodroot blossoms, well and good,
but I receive no word that would
set my troubled heart at ease,
nor could we turn our faces toward
the sun, and open by degrees,
unless we reach a clear accord.
And so our love goes, night and day:
it’s like the thorny hawthorn spray
that whips about in a bitter wind
from dusk to dawn, shellacked with sleet,
until the sun’s first rays ascend
through leaves and branches, spreading heat.
I have in mind one April morning
when she relented without warning,
relenting from her cold rebuff
in laughter, peals of happiness.
Sweet Christ, let me live long enough
to get my hands beneath her dress!
I hate the elevated talk
that disregards both root and stalk
and sets insipid pride above
vicissitudes of lust and strife.
Let others claim a higher love:
we’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife.
SYRINX
Just a glimpse
of rufous thatch
and curved bill
a brown thrasher
flipping up
wood chips
at the water’s edge
scuttles through sumac
and shakes the hedge
with oscillations
Panic constricts
the double syrinx
water reeds
bound with wax
goad and goaded
again and again
toward improvisation
chelping a wet
couplet through ceramic
licentious yet pure
yellow eye
disinterested
witness to the song
TELEPHONE
A mockingbird
perched on the hood