Foreclosure Since the day the banker drove out to tell them they had to sell they’d all pulled their eyes in close lest they dwell on beloved things as if their souls were in danger of passing into trees and hills and rooms and tools and of being auctioned off with everything else pulled their sight close to them like it was warmth and the loss of the farm one long cold night but in those last days like falconers they let their eyes fly off in great rushes sweeping through everything preying ravenously upon beauty in a kind of praying returning to them from time to time where they stood like towers in field or kitchen or woods the boy most of all because all he knew was the coming loss tempered by none of the relief his folks felt so twined with their sorrow it was hard for them to tell the two apart and the land recognizing this gave itself wholly to the boy to be remembered his father so busy moving machinery for the sale trying to put it all in light good enough to bring a decent price and his mother so busy scrubbing twenty years of their living from the floors neither noticed how full the boy was becoming with seeing how wide his eyes were nor noticed what it was his walking meant only asking him “Where are you going?” “Walking” “God but you’ve been walking” “Let him walk” and he walking out upon that farm he would soon be a stranger upon already the ash of trespass filled his steps even as every thing saw him for what he was an instrument of harvest sent out to gather into his soul every innocent holy thing before it was all subdivided and what little left to be farmed so exhausted by such specific rape and beleaguered with the petition of poison nothing would live but what it was determined by the inheritors should so that thistles as holy in their potential to cause pain as any willow gentled in its sorrow called out to the boy to be remembered because the next would not suffer them in the fence rows nor even find their distant purple blossoming beautiful but would go about solemnly spraying them nor would the cantilevered sheds be allowed to stand for the nothingness they stood for but these would be broken down like cardboard boxes heaped into little hills and these swiftly on the first windless day burned so that they were reduced only to bones of their nails and nine hundred Lents these cried out to the boy to be remembered as did the field trees his grandfather had let stand though pardoning them meant the fields whirled around them like conceptions of space and made for hard turns with the hay rake but had been deemed holy as they were havens for foxes and fawns and sanctuary for gentle things to run towards when the fields were scythed down within an inch of bare earth by a machine that was twenty men scything and the limbs of such trees deemed good enough for him to risk falling from for if farm boys can’t risk breaking bones how are all their chores worth all that sweat these as the boy walked called him for the first time ever before by his name to remember them the way their branches flowed into the sky like a river’s mouth for surely these would not be suffered but windrows made straight the foxes buried alive in their backfilled dens the stumps ground down beneath the level any plow could reach and years the soil had been patterned in whirls erased in long parallels that would know nothing but that they ran from one end of a field to the other in obedience but it wasn’t only the trees that called to be included in his memory but the whole woods standing in the silence of things only fleetingly on earth creaking with the approximate sound of a gallows abandoned by a crowd grown bored with the body’s metronomic swinging something of the guillotine in the way all the branches seemed stilled in the moment before falling even the birds’ throats shoveled full of the blue gravel of a silence of both the past and of the future so that for the first time in his life the boy felt like a trespasser there like a man in a church of rival denomination like a river that realizes it’s in the streets of an evacuated town and flows home to its proper bed then a buck broke from a break of thorns not to be remembered but to flee the boy’s consciousness as if it were a meadow bristling with guns but in the racket it made it was doomed to be remembered there were some things that wished not to be entered in the ledger of the boy’s heart that preferred if the farm was doomed to die to die with it and so actually avoided the boy such as the owl that could have revealed itself to him but chose to deepen itself in the narrative of limbs like a character that exists only in the author’s mind while other things leapt at him with such fervor to be remembered he almost felt sick with their insistence such as a certain hill that wrested a light down from the evening to flaunt its curvature insisting he remember the gradual falling graph of its horizon like war dead of an unpopular war the way it held its acre of wheat until he had to tear his eyes away and absorb the old mare who would be sold and promptly diced into dog meat because where they were moving the only horses were paddocked and sullen in engines of leased cars the mare galloped into his mind her mane livid with wind joyous in the knowledge she was eternal now thanks to him his attention like the attention Christ turned upon the lepers and the blind who came to him desperate to be healed passing from her in to the shadow of the silos he shivered in the cold dark they cast and under their heights sensing how they too held harvests knowing for the first time how excruciating it was for them to bear entire seasons of growth in the stasis of storage all that weight composed of entire summers’ suns and rain borne now for nothing for no animals would survive the sale all would be trucked away on dark roads milked by weary men in transit eyes rolling and revealing white in fear like stones from tombs revealing angels so that the silos in this knowledge seemed threatening to collapse and spill all the seeds they held in a desperate attempt at sowing what still possessed minds to grow so that the boy hurried through their shadows those deep and chilling communions to hear from the porch his mother calling him to supper in the house’s voice for the house also demanded to be remembered so he went towards it like a ship towards a coast of sirens their boxing of everything up had simplified the house into its barest elements so that it was as if for the first time in his life he saw it for what it was not what sheltered their lives but its life itself its doorframes windows banisters cracks in plaster its light fixtures hanging glumly with nothing to illuminate but their last supper in that kitchen also made bare all the cabinets empty nothing but the table and three chairs and what she’d needed to cook the last meal with they could’ve stayed a month or more longer before the closing but after the papers were signed he’d said he’d feel like a stranger there best to get on down to Dixon where he’d start at the plant Monday and she could get the house fixed up the way she was used to no use hanging around here waiting to get booted out I’ll walk away with my own dignity since this is all they let you keep in this world and even this they try to make you leave laying around so they can come take it too and then again in the voice of the house she called to him to come up from the shed where all he was doing was moving things from place to place to eat the bird dead on the table with a finality so utter it seemed impossible the meat could give them any strength to endure what they’d have to endure the next day and like it was any of the twenty or so years’ of nights he took off his boots the way he always did and washed up in the bath room and said “Smells good” which was what he said every evening even if he had a cold or it didn’t smell good at all and kicked the dog lovingly away from the table the dog which they’d keep and which they’d all burdened with their affection because they had less and less to feel affection for and though she wondered what they had to be thankful for he led them in the prayer they’d said every night all those years no matter how bad things had gotten saying Bless us oh Lord for these Thy gifts we are about to receive from Thy Bounty through Christ our Lord Amen and as they ate in silence and as all sounds now also poured into the boy sieved into senses it was as if a great magician hovered over the land with a wand of clotted stars to pronounce some arcane spell of disappearance upon them all and though talk was tried mostly they fell silent beneath that silent gesture until the bird was picked bones and they went out to the porch conscious now of last times the last time washing dinner plates under that faucet he’d never quite gotten to quit leaking last time sitting down in his rocker with the relief of a man who has just eaten well with the ones he loves last time watching evening fall in the lilacs last as if in their blossoms some bastion of day held out like forts when a nation’s fallen and then what they’d all rushed out to be sure to see they saw the last first firefly glow in the grass and though no one said anything by quick glances all three knew all three had seen it and had registered its significance especially the boy because no sooner had the first’s light expired into the lights of all the others but he and she began in the privacy of their minds to worry about the day while the boy pardoned of worry suffered the last procession of the farm into him ebbing into his eyes peaceful as spring water now as the wand flinched and the trick accomplished not the disappearance of the farm but its conversion from matter into memory
Foreclosure
Foreclosure
Foreclosure
Foreclosure Since the day the banker drove out to tell them they had to sell they’d all pulled their eyes in close lest they dwell on beloved things as if their souls were in danger of passing into trees and hills and rooms and tools and of being auctioned off with everything else pulled their sight close to them like it was warmth and the loss of the farm one long cold night but in those last days like falconers they let their eyes fly off in great rushes sweeping through everything preying ravenously upon beauty in a kind of praying returning to them from time to time where they stood like towers in field or kitchen or woods the boy most of all because all he knew was the coming loss tempered by none of the relief his folks felt so twined with their sorrow it was hard for them to tell the two apart and the land recognizing this gave itself wholly to the boy to be remembered his father so busy moving machinery for the sale trying to put it all in light good enough to bring a decent price and his mother so busy scrubbing twenty years of their living from the floors neither noticed how full the boy was becoming with seeing how wide his eyes were nor noticed what it was his walking meant only asking him “Where are you going?” “Walking” “God but you’ve been walking” “Let him walk” and he walking out upon that farm he would soon be a stranger upon already the ash of trespass filled his steps even as every thing saw him for what he was an instrument of harvest sent out to gather into his soul every innocent holy thing before it was all subdivided and what little left to be farmed so exhausted by such specific rape and beleaguered with the petition of poison nothing would live but what it was determined by the inheritors should so that thistles as holy in their potential to cause pain as any willow gentled in its sorrow called out to the boy to be remembered because the next would not suffer them in the fence rows nor even find their distant purple blossoming beautiful but would go about solemnly spraying them nor would the cantilevered sheds be allowed to stand for the nothingness they stood for but these would be broken down like cardboard boxes heaped into little hills and these swiftly on the first windless day burned so that they were reduced only to bones of their nails and nine hundred Lents these cried out to the boy to be remembered as did the field trees his grandfather had let stand though pardoning them meant the fields whirled around them like conceptions of space and made for hard turns with the hay rake but had been deemed holy as they were havens for foxes and fawns and sanctuary for gentle things to run towards when the fields were scythed down within an inch of bare earth by a machine that was twenty men scything and the limbs of such trees deemed good enough for him to risk falling from for if farm boys can’t risk breaking bones how are all their chores worth all that sweat these as the boy walked called him for the first time ever before by his name to remember them the way their branches flowed into the sky like a river’s mouth for surely these would not be suffered but windrows made straight the foxes buried alive in their backfilled dens the stumps ground down beneath the level any plow could reach and years the soil had been patterned in whirls erased in long parallels that would know nothing but that they ran from one end of a field to the other in obedience but it wasn’t only the trees that called to be included in his memory but the whole woods standing in the silence of things only fleetingly on earth creaking with the approximate sound of a gallows abandoned by a crowd grown bored with the body’s metronomic swinging something of the guillotine in the way all the branches seemed stilled in the moment before falling even the birds’ throats shoveled full of the blue gravel of a silence of both the past and of the future so that for the first time in his life the boy felt like a trespasser there like a man in a church of rival denomination like a river that realizes it’s in the streets of an evacuated town and flows home to its proper bed then a buck broke from a break of thorns not to be remembered but to flee the boy’s consciousness as if it were a meadow bristling with guns but in the racket it made it was doomed to be remembered there were some things that wished not to be entered in the ledger of the boy’s heart that preferred if the farm was doomed to die to die with it and so actually avoided the boy such as the owl that could have revealed itself to him but chose to deepen itself in the narrative of limbs like a character that exists only in the author’s mind while other things leapt at him with such fervor to be remembered he almost felt sick with their insistence such as a certain hill that wrested a light down from the evening to flaunt its curvature insisting he remember the gradual falling graph of its horizon like war dead of an unpopular war the way it held its acre of wheat until he had to tear his eyes away and absorb the old mare who would be sold and promptly diced into dog meat because where they were moving the only horses were paddocked and sullen in engines of leased cars the mare galloped into his mind her mane livid with wind joyous in the knowledge she was eternal now thanks to him his attention like the attention Christ turned upon the lepers and the blind who came to him desperate to be healed passing from her in to the shadow of the silos he shivered in the cold dark they cast and under their heights sensing how they too held harvests knowing for the first time how excruciating it was for them to bear entire seasons of growth in the stasis of storage all that weight composed of entire summers’ suns and rain borne now for nothing for no animals would survive the sale all would be trucked away on dark roads milked by weary men in transit eyes rolling and revealing white in fear like stones from tombs revealing angels so that the silos in this knowledge seemed threatening to collapse and spill all the seeds they held in a desperate attempt at sowing what still possessed minds to grow so that the boy hurried through their shadows those deep and chilling communions to hear from the porch his mother calling him to supper in the house’s voice for the house also demanded to be remembered so he went towards it like a ship towards a coast of sirens their boxing of everything up had simplified the house into its barest elements so that it was as if for the first time in his life he saw it for what it was not what sheltered their lives but its life itself its doorframes windows banisters cracks in plaster its light fixtures hanging glumly with nothing to illuminate but their last supper in that kitchen also made bare all the cabinets empty nothing but the table and three chairs and what she’d needed to cook the last meal with they could’ve stayed a month or more longer before the closing but after the papers were signed he’d said he’d feel like a stranger there best to get on down to Dixon where he’d start at the plant Monday and she could get the house fixed up the way she was used to no use hanging around here waiting to get booted out I’ll walk away with my own dignity since this is all they let you keep in this world and even this they try to make you leave laying around so they can come take it too and then again in the voice of the house she called to him to come up from the shed where all he was doing was moving things from place to place to eat the bird dead on the table with a finality so utter it seemed impossible the meat could give them any strength to endure what they’d have to endure the next day and like it was any of the twenty or so years’ of nights he took off his boots the way he always did and washed up in the bath room and said “Smells good” which was what he said every evening even if he had a cold or it didn’t smell good at all and kicked the dog lovingly away from the table the dog which they’d keep and which they’d all burdened with their affection because they had less and less to feel affection for and though she wondered what they had to be thankful for he led them in the prayer they’d said every night all those years no matter how bad things had gotten saying Bless us oh Lord for these Thy gifts we are about to receive from Thy Bounty through Christ our Lord Amen and as they ate in silence and as all sounds now also poured into the boy sieved into senses it was as if a great magician hovered over the land with a wand of clotted stars to pronounce some arcane spell of disappearance upon them all and though talk was tried mostly they fell silent beneath that silent gesture until the bird was picked bones and they went out to the porch conscious now of last times the last time washing dinner plates under that faucet he’d never quite gotten to quit leaking last time sitting down in his rocker with the relief of a man who has just eaten well with the ones he loves last time watching evening fall in the lilacs last as if in their blossoms some bastion of day held out like forts when a nation’s fallen and then what they’d all rushed out to be sure to see they saw the last first firefly glow in the grass and though no one said anything by quick glances all three knew all three had seen it and had registered its significance especially the boy because no sooner had the first’s light expired into the lights of all the others but he and she began in the privacy of their minds to worry about the day while the boy pardoned of worry suffered the last procession of the farm into him ebbing into his eyes peaceful as spring water now as the wand flinched and the trick accomplished not the disappearance of the farm but its conversion from matter into memory