The morning after it burned we rode
our bikes over there to watch the smoke
uncoil and disappear. I suppose
we were amazed by such destruction,
how sudden it could be and how
the shop no longer had a form.
We figured Lonnie Belcher, a boy
we knew from school though he was older,
would become a hero for being close
to all of this — his grandfather
and a strange, unsteady uncle ran
the shop. Lonnie had been the one
who’d told us about Hobo Town,
which was a few miles down the tracks
and farther down a spur that ran
a ways and ended in the woods.
It was decided, then, that since
we’d seen the blown-up shop and that
had made us brave, we might as well
continue on to Hobo Town.
In single file we clattered down
the tracks; there were three or four of us,
our wheels rattled over the ties,
the smell of creosote and pitch
was thick and every little while
we’d stop and listen to the rails
to see if there was any singing.
Beyond the brief freight-yard, we came
to a shack that one time might have been
for a switchman. We looked in the doorway and saw
a dirty magazine that was torn
in pieces, but a page had been hung
on a nail in the plank wall — it was strange
to see her there, a decoration,
but she, the woman on the page,
was someone’s favorite; she’d been chosen,
her image was elevated, and now
with sunlight on her, the altar shone.
Faith is difficult to define,
but most of us are willing to say
something we don’t quite know must come before
ourselves, something
that isn’t our idea yet
we hold it higher up and think
it is the symbol of a secret.
We found the overgrown spur
and followed it a little distance
until we reached a bridge over
a stream and there we stopped. We could see
the beginning of the woods and hills,
and a twist of smoke from a fire rose up
and trickled into the hot sky.
Again we were amazed and afraid,
though no one spoke it; but now I see
there must be fear, there must be strange
unsteady fear in faith. The hoboes
were over there. Their presence, like that
of God or lust or even grief,
had drawn us out in wonder, but then,
in shame, we’d trembled and turned away,
and that, I think, is also part
of faith, its imperfection.
NO. 9 WIRE
I go down close, eye-blank
to the first page of a thing, like the hank
of wire I hung over a nail
in the barn. I’ve twisted the origins
of the wire and it’s likely Mister Key,
careless and melancholy long
before my time, it’s likely he
is the one who left the wire, perhaps
not long enough to hitch a gate.
But people have their visions, don’t they?
Where everything inside has purpose
and nothing is cast out because
belonging to the vision is
the vision. I’ve seen a hive of bees
work mountain laurel trees, I’ve seen
them visit every blossom, and thought
to myself, so must it be in heaven.
The other man from the old days
I think about, Sylvanus Shade,
took a wild rose cane
and bent it to a shepherd’s crook,
and when he died they stuck the crook
in the ground and roses bloomed upon it,
tresses of roses tumbled down,
as he had claimed they would. He said
there was no end to anything,
not even death would be an end.
His daughter, Sylvie, made a teacher
of the schoolmarm type, and she
taught Mister Key, back when the roads
were traces and tracks along the streams.
I’ve seen the way he made a 4,
marked backwards on a barn beam.
And he must have learned the philosophy
that disarray is beautiful,
and even a piece of wire is rare,
though what a man could use it for
is more uncommon still, and endless.
So he unknowingly taught me,
just as careless with my numbers
and with melancholy of my own,
who loves rose canes and bees
and the sweet of mountain laurel trees,
and all the unseen underneath.
The people who had this place before
it came to me were the Graves, but the man
who built the barn was Mister Key —
I’ve heard he was a troubled man —
oh, he was clever with his hands,
but sorely troubled otherwise,
like a man who’s wandered out of a book.
SLEEP
There is a room, and inside the room
two old men are sitting side
by side in a pair of stuffed chairs.
I see the backs of the chairs, but a slip
of light beneath them lets me see
four