Poetry by Joe Amaral
1.
I scry through ancient farm walls
of warped scrap wood, rustic as concentric
heart rings; a crenulated tin man.
Unripe blackberries dangle
off oxidized trellises. Emaciated
figs, brazenly sour oranges.
Along rows of blighted tomato vines
I mire in stagnant trenches
once irrigated by the leaking tank house.
Sit astride tractors that no longer run,
black grease viscous, congealing
in prolonged stasis like hay ricks.
I peel paint chips and sponge rot,
sleep in sawdust, inhale the discoloration
of dull bandsaws and blades.
2.
As a boy I ran with my sheepdog
up and down long chicken pens
under the silent appraisal of bunnies,
listening to echoes of rooster crow,
honk of irate geese and bleat of new lambs
still getting their gangly legs under them.
Multitudes of feral cats mousing
and birding and sunning and sleeping.
Atop aluminum coop roofs I jumped into
musty haystacks, running back and forth among
tools and machines and soil! So much soil
full of weeds or plowed to dark chunks seeded
with so many vegetables I could hate
the taste of half but still have dozens to enjoy.
3.
Then the well ran dry.
I drank it up growing big and hearty,
hit my stride and instead of sagging
and wilting and giving back to beckoning
dirt; recycle, mulch, replant,
I kept aging and didn’t rejoin
the cyclical particles comprising
the farm’s starving existence
until it was too late.
4.
The farm bore my play, my antics.
Put up with my solo missions
of destruction; bemused at the mud
and blood and scars and small hurts
I accumulated in headstrong heedlessness.
It waited for me when I moved away.
It waited for personhood.
I never returned.
Where does land forgotten fall?
Oceanic myth? Disingenuous dust …
winds afraid to wail what is happening.
Suffocated in disrepair, it returns
to a natural state unnatural to us.
5.
We idolize old barns as relics of times past:
I see them as failures of man—
of myself.
Only in poetic dreams does my childhood
recede from adult imprisonment.
It was beautiful. It is a funeral.
I scry through ancient farm walls
of warped scrap wood, rustic as concentric
heart rings; a crenulated tin man.
Joe Amaral’s first poetry collection The Street Medic won the 2018 Palooka Press Chapbook Contest. His writing has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Last Leaves Magazine, Please See Me, Rise Up Review, River Heron Review, The Night Heron Barks, and University Professors Press. Joe works forty-eight-hour shifts as a paramedic on California’s Central Coast. He can be found on Instagram @joeticmedic.