Bullroarer

by Genoways, Ted

• ISBN13: 9781555535070
• ISBN10: 1555535070
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-09-27
• Publisher: Northeastern Univ Pr

Summary

Winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize

Author Biography

Ted Genoways was educated at Nebraska Wesleyan University (B.A.), Texas Tech University (M.A.),and the University of Virginia (M.F.A.). He is the editor of The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernandez and the author of three chapbooks, most recently, Anna, washing. His poems have appeared in DoubleTake, New England Review, New Republic, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and twice received the Guy Owens Poetry Prize from Southern Poetry Review. Founding editor of the literary journal Meridian, he is an acquisitions editor at the Minnesota Historical Society Press. He lives in Minneapolis. Marilyn Hacker directs the masters' program in creative writing and literature at the City College of New York. She is the author of Presentation Piece, Assumptions, Going Back to the River, Selected Poems: 1965-1990, and Squares and Courtyards. She has received a Lamont Poetry Selection, a Lambda Literary Award, and the National Book Award. She lives in New York City and Paris.

Table of Contents

Outside the Slaughterhouse	p. xvii
The Cow Caught in the Ice	p. 3
Premonition	p. 3
Picking Down the Rows	p. 4
Tideline Debris	p. 5
Annunciation	p. 6
Like This, Slaughtering the Winter Sow	p. 7
The Bolt-struck Oak	p. 8
Labor	p. 8
Drought	p. 9
Depth of Field	p. 10
Flux: The Turning	p. 11
Landscape with Crows	p. 12
Pieta	p. 17
Uncle Earl and the War to End All Wars	p. 18
Under the Big Top	p. 20
Ashes	p. 27
Night Train	p. 30
Bullroarer	p. 32
Into the Storm	p. 37
The One Day	p. 39
Blaze	p. 41
The Killing Floor	p. 42
The Drover	p. 42
Moonshining	p. 43
The Bird-catcher	p. 44
Rendering	p. 45
Horn	p. 46
8:15	p. 47
Three Still Lifes, 1949	p. 51
For My Father, Who Does Not Dance	p. 54
Landscape with Dust	p. 55
Three Sonnets Written in Clouds	p. 58
Late Refrains for a Grandfather	p. 61
The Dead Have a Way of Returning	p. 68
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

    The Cow Caught in the Ice

    I. PREMONITION

Catherine Genoways, October 27, 1906

The last holstein sways to the mud hole, creamed with ice.

Owls drop from their roosts, clacking beaks against dusk, welled

without warning into barn eaves. The herd dog eyes

a shrew, chewing sap, then yelps and buries his tail.

The shrew moves deeper into cordwood. Cornstalks

sink into fields. Like corrugated tin, furrows

rill toward shelterbelts. Spruce sag with the weight of hawks,

their eyes lit by each burst before thunderclap. The bur-oak,

laid open by lightning, whose scorched branch caps still hold

split shells of spring hatch, whose roots now rise like lost bones,

slumps to the north. There: above treetops, the blue anvil,

below, the man, slapping herefords, drowned by groans,

their grey breath spiriting away. Across dark fields

his wife, bolting windows closed, receives her vision:

pens filled with ghosts of calves, years since gone to slaughter,

loose jaws churning black cud, eyes dull and unwishing,

their mothers' udders swing with mud and green water,

the children crouch, mouthing biscuits without butter--

    II. PICKING DOWN THE ROWS

Lewis Cass Genoways, October 28

He tugs the broad-brim over his brow and whistles.

The bay's ears twitch. He spits, then spurs her toward the ridge,

where thistles poke through drifts, faded grey and brittle.

He pauses at the crest: to the west Chapman Bridge,

east the Burlington tracks--snake of smoke and boxcars,

coal-dark, shadowing valleys like a contour ditch.

On either side wire fences hum like strummed guitars.

He can almost remember a time when all this

was a blowing wilderness of grass, when the hiss

of wind whipped through bluestem like a cloudburst. He fears

her dead, that snow drifted in her nostrils, or ice

sealed her lips. When he calls over hills, all he hears

is a hoarse voice repeating, more sluggish each time,

less his own. When he was younger, he picked down rows

of apples, red as plums among leaves. One sundown,

a girl came from Pawnee camp, carrying armloads

of wheat chaff to trade as cattle feed. His boss frowned

and shook his head. He hears their laughter even now,

the girl turning home. Perhaps it was applejack

they sipped from steel cups that hoisted him to his feet.

He snaps the reins, the bay limping through snow dunes, back

to the barn. He brushes the horses down, drapes each

in wool blankets. He'll find her at sunup, sunken

to the withers, her eyes blue cataracts, tongue stiff.

In the remote orchards of Cedar Bluff, young, drunk,

and perfecting his curve with a jonathon smith,

that Pawnee girl might still swap winesap for a kiss.

    III. TIDELINE DEBRIS

Catherine, October 28

She watches for him by the window's leaded glass.

It ripples like tideline debris ringing edges

of summer ponds. As a girl, she crawled through tallgrass,

squeezing pollywogs till they shed their tails. Her ledges

hold vinegar and dillspice while she cooks, but nights

she lowers each jar till a circle forms around

the old Franklin stove. L.C. feeds a split rail-tie,

scavenged from the switchyard, into its grated mouth.

She rises first, her children still tucked in the loft,

and steps softly, now lifting each cold jar to rest

around the skillet. This is the time she covets:

when the stove is cool enough to touch, each hand pressed

hard against its belly to feel inside what's left

and almost breathing. The last four children drowned

in their beds before the pastor could hold their heads

under. Jaundice , doctor said, their stomachs so round

they were ready to pop. She can't live for the dead;

seven live mouths hang open. She slips back to bed--

two minutes till the coffee boils --but keeps one eye

on that orange egg purling across the frozen pane,

like watching her dad light stars in the nighttime sky,

making constellations of sheep pens, against rain

and wolves and the darkness that never died in years

after he did. Go on sun, get up, sweeten snow

into warm rivers. It's all of those things she fears:

glass is fire and sand, water expands in the cold.

Seconds now, hold your breath --the kettle's lips explode.

    IV. ANNUNCIATION

Catherine and Lewis Cass, October 29

When he finds her, he tromps to the barn, bridles

and harnesses the horse. He drops a ballpeen and chain

in a leather satchel, tucks his widest chisel

under his arm. Meat, by now, crystals on the bone.

He carves a circle and wrestles the last milk cow

to shore. It's near dusk. He boots her purpled udder

and the bag splits like a single-stitch seam but no

blood, no milk. He locks the front gate while dogs turn

circles at his feet. Tonight, he will let them burn

beside the stove, twitching through thickets, thumping tails.

His wife cooks and watches out windows shuttered tight.

He sits. He eats. One by one, children become bales

for him to hoist up the ladder. If the horse died

that would have been worse. Or any of these children.

He piles on crazy quilts sewn from his worn-out shirts.

He snuffs the lamplight, whispers, I'm sort Catherine ,

into the sagging moons of her breasts, her weak heart

drumming so hard he wonders if her ribs might split.

Outside, the wind picks up again, hard flakes ticking

at the window, wheeling upward, swirling around

empty limbs of the cottonwood and hickory,

drifting, eddying over the blue-rigid cow,

filling the dark circle of water her body

left round and wanting. Tomorrow, four Pawnee men

will dig out the drift and cut the cold-burned body

into pieces to feed families of bone and skin.

He covers her mouth, so she won't stir the children.

    Like This, Slaughtering the Winter Sow

Lewis Cass and Wallace Genoways, December 6, 1906

He squeezes the blue heart like this in his glove

until clots break and spill on his feet.

Dad doesn't couple this muscle with love.

He says, Feel the thrum. You have to be rough .

To show me, he murmurs da-dum for each beat

and squeezes the blue heart like this in his glove.

He carves and curses the sow for being tough,

her thighs turned rope by heavy teats.

Dad doesn't couple her muscle with love.

He grinds scraps with black pepper and clove,

stuffs her feet in vinegar jars. Nearly complete,

he squeezes the blue heart-- like this --in his glove,

like this , he says, like wringing a sponge .

I close my fist, refuse to touch the meat.

Dad doesn't couple this muscle with love;

he's fleeing a vision: his wife like a potbelly stove.

Like this --his arms bulge-- or mama won't eat ,

and he squeezes the blue heart like this in his glove.

Dad doesn't couple this muscle with love.

    The Bolt-struck Oak

For they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.

                                            --Hosea 8:7

    I. LABOR

Theodore Thompson Genoways, born June 24, 1907

The midwife says, bite this strop . Outside, burn-killed limbs--

once wide as the province of God--lie piled in cords,

sorted from kindling to cook logs. Lynn tears muslin

into even strips, watching Wallace through the door

drag the jagtooth back and forth. His father totters

the branch until it breaks free in his hand, then points

to the next. The girls drop pails--half-filled with water,

half with silt--swelling dust from under the floor joists.

They pour into a cookpot, now nearing a boil.

Wallace buckles the saw to free it from binding,

but three tines snap. He feels the break, gap-toothed and wet

with sap, then turns to his father, stacking behind him,

and calls, should we save out in case of a casket ?

The midwife wipes her glasses, grips the baby's crown,

whispers, now when I tell you, I want you to bite ,

then twists, so the shoulders slip past. When he cries out,

she cuts the cord. His father--in the day's last light--

bends Wallace to the stump, belt arcing like a scythe.

    II. DROUGHT

Lewis Cass and Catherine Genoways, August 4, 1907

L.C. wonders if it ever rains where she is.

Though he could straighten his arm across the mattress

to touch her side, he knows--like oceans of cheatgrass

choking snakeweed and sage--the sick baby constricts

her roots. Parts of her brittle like winter-killed corn.

The day he chained the team to the dead oak and pulled,

something buried bent, then cracked. The baby was born,

and rootstock snapped like bones till the rough trunk jolted

the ground. At the glass all night, she stared at the hole,

while he lay in his cradle, silent and yellow.

He still never cries, and the doctor says sun's

the best cure, as if there were somewhere she could go

for shade. She twirls the sawtooth leaf between her thumb

and finger, wishing for the wind's slow whisper back

like mist on the roof. L.C.'s in the barn, truing

planks for a floor. From where she sits, he ebbs in black.

She can't see rills of sweat or him stretch, then loosen

his shirt, or hear--high in the rafters--doves cooing

between thrusts of the plane. He inches a level

down the board's length, squinting. He doesn't see her breasts

pale against the jaundiced child. He squares by bevel,

preferring straight lines to her curves where the boy rests

and suckles. Tonight she undresses by lamplight

and slips into bed. L.C. curls her like a spoon,

murmuring how oak retains the quiet of night

well past dawn, but she dreams of hills thick with rescue.

Curtains draw open, cut clover fills every room.

    III. DEPTH OF FIELD

Theodore and Goldie Louise Genoways, August 8, 1907

Goldie holds her arms out, stiff as a drying-horse,

and her mother places the baby in her lap,

folding Goldie's wrists, then lacing her white fingers

till they cradle the bowl of his middle, fat

as the bulb of an oil-lamp. The photographer

cranes his neck--the kitchen dim, but dense with noon heat,

sun beating on tin planks nailed to the bare rafters--

then twists the aperture. Goldie shifts in her seat

and Ted cries. Still, the man steadies a metal sheet

in his palm and sprinkles magnesium powder,

so she begins--after his drape falls and wick tips,

but before smoke billows, before even the flare

or pop, his words don't blink yet on the air--begins

to sing a lullaby, so that when they emerge

from the printer's fix, her lips are slightly open,

and what she finds is not herself, or her brother,

or the kitchen, but what the unblinking discern:

their farm cast in the brown grain of sepia tone--

their oak table turned butternut in the cream-glow,

flowing from the window to the open cupboard,

faced with false willowware, its blues washed to yellow

and rust. Behind them the dead ground, endless scrub-board

of empty furrows, and--where the bur-oak once rose--

a dirt mound like a fresh grave. But at this storm's core,

Goldie's flaxen hair, a single blonde cowlick, floats

over her sallow brother, cradled in her arms.

Fallowed fields , her father says, yield twice the sweetcorn .

    IV. FLUX: THE TURNING

Lewis Cass, August 29, 1907

The baby--bloated with bile--attracts chicken hawks.

The doctor says flux is normal, just his liver

unsouring. Still, they twist thick as flies. Dusk: cur dogs

crouch where the windbreak slopes south toward the river.

As a boy, L.C. watched a pack close on a calf--

sick from still water--licking the green from its tail.

He prowls the fenceline, following the shotgun's shaft

like a snout. One coyote snapped the calf's flank. It wailed

like a newborn and buckled. He stiffens, then wheels

back toward the house. Light leaks from each windowpane,

sending lattice shadows across the grass, stunted

and sunwashed grey. In the distance, a cattle train

sounds its whistle, and one of the dogs cocks its head.

He levels and fires--a flare like lightning bursting

in a pair of ember eyes. The calf tried to bawl

but coyotes tore the tongue from its mouth, blood coursing

in streaming ropes. Sunup, he'll find the half-breed balled

in a bed of indian grass, clotted and smaller

than he hoped. He grips it by the scruff. Catherine

on the grass beats dust from the rugs, while the three girls

dandle their brother. In a stand of big bluestem,

he stacks branches around the carcass, cuts and piles

underbrush, then tramps to the house, grey thunderhead

climbing the ridge. He shoves the wellcap to the ground.

First drops--dimpling the dirt--redden and spread

like blossoms or blood. He calls Wallace from the house,

and they ride out together to herd in the cows.

    Landscape with Crows

Among the rat's nests of rags and glass insulators,

scattered on the worn planks of the attic floor,

a stack of oil paintings lay wrapped in canvas.

We drove all morning to get to that house

where my mother spent her summers as a girl.

    But now that we were there, hunched below the rafters,

listening to the windows flute and trill, it was not

the familiar images of hayrakes and rusted trucks

or meadow grass whipping back and forth across

    empty fields that she wanted, but these still lifes

and pastorals of far-off places. In the silence

    of her upstairs room, my mother's cousin Alice

followed the words of the correspondence packet

    in every detail, stirred her palette to make colors

she had never seen. Her peaches and raspberries

    looked warm and soft-lit. A fireglow yellowed

the window of the little country cottage set

    among the evergreens as the horse-drawn sleigh

approached through the snow. What she wanted most

    was the cool of the canvas, just before

the brush interrupts its calm, like a summer pond

    with a rower stroking so slowly that no ripples

move out from the bow and the black surface reflects

nothing. Out there, in the cricket-thick heat

of those summer nights, my mother would slip

    to the bunkhouse where her father

and the other hired men had to sleep. Weary from

    stooping under the hoods of farm trucks

or greasing the feed-grinder shaft, he would kiss

    her forehead, then fall back to snoring.

Moonlight turned the lampblack sky a deep

    cobalt blue and the wind of forty years sand-pocked

the abandoned farmhouse to flake-white. That morning

    as we lowered the paintings through the attic door

and carried them, still wrapped in the flapping canvas,

    to our station wagon, the sun-blear burned

in my memory those twin sienna tracks that snaked

through fields of ochre and indian yellow.

If I remember my mother's stories of how her dad

chopped the heads from rattlers with a hoe

or picture rows of tipped stones for snakebitten children

in the Bodarc Cemetery, it's only because it seemed

as foreign and wonderful to me then as the cliffs

of France must have seemed to Alice. Alone

in her tiny corner room, she scraped her knife

    across the bare plain of her palette and dreamed

that one day she would see more than earth and sky,

    one day just drive and never come home. She heard

the tractor roar and hum. From the stillness of her easel

she turned back to the chaos of the world, framed

for a moment by her windowpane: the slow mower

    adrift on fields of hay, the sky alive with crows.

Copyright © 2001 Ted Genoways. All rights reserved.