Drum
Early morning climb to the roof
Cold dew on pebbled tar, taste of
Galvanized nails in your mouth
Work — nail shingle to shingle
tight —
Each hammer pound echoes another
Pound in the hills, enough to
wonder
Where it ends and who hears it then
Charlotte
Scrag is what they call her
A woman who has been on the river
Longer than anyone of us —
Long white hair braided and pinned
up,
Yellow slicker, old pants and a
squint.
Once a week she rides down the road
Real slow to the Massachusetts
border,
Looks in on everyone’s place,
Then turns around and coming back
Does the same.
Her son doesn’t live out here
anymore —
When Clayton did, he lost his wife
for it.
Lived with his son and the small
farm
For as many years as it takes to
get
Sick of it, then moved closer to
town
And worked for the state park.
Now his own son is doing the same —
With a wife and a baby and the job
In a wood factory, near Vernon,
Where the power plant burns into
the sky.
That leaves Scrag.
I heard that name first from a
young hunter
Who would never hunt, half what she
has,
And he knows it.
She’s tiny, body gripped like a
hickory,
She’ll tend the farm all men have
left —
Mend fence and draw water and
shovel shit,
Make sure the pigs don’t get loose.
When Clayton comes to sugar at
mud-time
She hangs the buckets with him,
Pulls a tractor along the side of
the road.
Her hair’s long and white and
probably beautiful.
In this raw wind it blows apart
like late summer
Milkweed.
Treeing the Raccoon
I’m running and dodging mud holes
And ice, a human wind slamming out
of
The woodshed and into the
moonlight,
Where we have lain and waited the
Return of the raccoon. I was
thinking
Of grabbing a coal shovel, the axe,
Even a stick on my way out the
door,
But my voice seemed to do the trick
—
Frightening him off tin sheets of
The duck pen and into the darkness
of
His mask. I’m crushing through soft
snow
And somewhere ahead he’s scurrying
it
Seems in a half-circle, until my
war cry
Has gripped him claws and bark up a
Tall ash tree between the house and
pond —
Maybe 20 feet — until he has
regained
Himself in the crotch; where under
the
Wizard cap of stars I poke a
flashlight
Into the first night of spring, and
with
A disgusted look in the eye, he
turns his
_________________________
Bob Arnold
WHERE RIVERS MEET
