Names
Something happens to them —
They get sullen, country kids.
Not city kids who become country,
But true hicks, who smell of cowshit,
Skin like corn snow in March. We once
Knew a ten year old girl who would visit
Us, braids of sunny hair, who at eighteen was
Hair cropped and sallow. No matter how
Hard I looked I couldn’t find that
Ten year old we would meet on the back road
As she hiked home from school, jumping
Puddles, smiling into our eyes, never
A schoolbook in her arms. Most others quit
School by sixteen, get married and wreck cars
Through their teenage years and can
Rebuild an engine blindfolded, but are
Looked upon as stupid. Slow.
Who torch a vacant barn for kicks
Then join the Army, who look at tan
Whispery weekend girls like a bull at a
Fence, who get married and love their
Kids but piss on their wives; names like
Moose, Bub, Wally, they stomp around.
Big Mouth
It really should be a simple rural life.
Most times it is, honest.
However, let me tell you about one
Secret meeting I went to once in a
Fine country home newly restored
With the best of apple cider served
By an open woodfire attended mostly
By men who had this great idea to
Save a local sawmill from any development
And the way proposed in whispers by these
Men with too much power elsewhere,
Was to arrange a midnight dumping
Of toxic barrels onto the property
And that should save our forest
River valley of any developers
And their kind.
Potatoes
Native, who was born in our house
And who couldn’t stand himself any
Longer that we were here and he wasn’t
But was a friend sort of anyway decided
One day to come visit with his tractor and
Put in a garden for us of potatoes right
Where he remembered his family once
Knew most of this land to be all potato
Fields and he sank into late Spring mud
And forgot the red oak trees were now
Fifty years older and taller and broader and
Not kind to sunlight where Native tilled
For a half hour getting nowhere but we
Let him do what he had to do
Bob Arnold
Yokel
Longhouse
2011
