Compass and Clock - David Sanders

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up solace

      (What could they be there?

      What do we want them to be?

      —Islands built on air!)

      among their trunks, burled

      and dwarfed and stripped of their bark,

      in our full-scale world.

       John Porter Produce

      This is the shower

      that every day settles the dust.

      In less than an hour

      it’s passed. Then, a crust

      of mud coats everything.

      Since now it’s raining,

      duck inside. And though the rain won’t stop,

      it turns into a mercurial drop

      in a bucket. Near the grapes,

      a cat naps.

      On the wall, a calendar

      noting the days the lunar phases appear

      is open to June

      of last year.

      Not that time stopped then,

      or slowed, it’s just that it has gone

      as quietly as their game of dominoes,

      which anyone might lose.

      Eggs and fruit are what the days produce.

      Each old man knows

      the weight and cost of all

      the goods by holding them in hand. Still, the one

      who’s just played his turn

      weighs them on the scale

      for a stranger who happened in

      while the fruit sat ripening.

      Step outside—

      the rain has quit and the mud has nearly dried.

      The sun is out

      and the air, unlike before, is not so dirty.

      Inside the bag, the fruit

      is fresh, almost bitter, and gritty.

       Dressing the Pheasant

      After the knife hit the craw

      of the bird gone stiff and cool

      with ice and time in transit,

      I removed the seeds, still whole,

      from below the cocked head

      and fingered them like beads,

      one prayer apiece, as if grain

      picked from the gullet of a bird

      were of greater grace than if not,

      in a hunter’s boot, let’s say,

      shook out and left to grow,

      or before the bird was shot,

      if hours had passed and the seeds

      had broken down and turned

      into the spectrum of feathers

      that rose out of its nest of weeds . . .

      But when all the seeds that filled

      that sack inside the bird—

      the rest of the broken string—

      slipped out and spilled,

      I could not make them more

      than they were:

      undigested and wet on a paper

      bought for the occasion, the chore.

       The Alternates

      for Margaret Neill

      Faced with going home again,

      where you grew up and all of that,

      you take the normal route, a road

      connecting town with county, one

      in which a set of simple turns

      turns down your own gravel drive.

      They don’t occur to you—the alternate

      ways you’d sometimes walk—pastures,

      farmers’ woods, really not much

      more than seasonal display.

      But at the time they drove you down

      into their thick. You came out

      the other side, nearer to town,

      replaced by someone who saw more

      than you had seen going in:

      yourself, of course, a half an hour,

      an hour, older.

      They seemed amused,

      the few villagers you saw,

      when they said, as in my case,

      “David, what brings you to town?”

      Remember how you walked among them

      as if with news they’d not yet learned?

      Maybe they’d known all along,

      patient while your knowledge, light

      at first, grew large—a weight you wore,

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