Iowa Elegy

By Gary J. Whitehead

 

Like the birds of the flyway,

we fled the cold in ’95,

but the cold found us anyway

on a desolate Iowa road

in a desolate Iowa farmhouse,

where we sat in the living room shivering.

Through rattling single-panes,

the wind blew a tune

with the barn cats’ mewls

and the goats’ constant bleating.

The way we struggled in our love

that late spring struggled in its art,

drew filigrees of frost

on the kitchen window,

vapored our breathing,

purpled the distant graveyard

like a distance in a Corot.

Summer came and upstaged it.

Both of us bleeding

from a wound we couldn’t see,

we gouged the ground

to make a future we could eat,

made bonfires that invited bats

from other farms,

bats that by morning

had turned to barn swallows

erasing moths

from the warming air.

The crows were always there,

cawing the acres that hemmed us in,

gleaning like peasants

between the steaming corn.

I see now we meant

to trick ourselves

into a Midwestern contentedness,

and it worked for a time.

It prowled the hills

like the coyote we heard howl

until our neighbor shot it,

left it to rot in a culvert.

Turkey vultures sketched

their bulls-eyes then,

alit to dig in,

and, when we’d drive past,

they’d rise from the carcass

like possessed cherubs.

All that hot and humid summer

I watched the skeleton

emerge from its putrid pelt,

smelled the future on a breeze:

death and sprayed manure

and the American Beauties

when they burst like wounds

out of their thorny canes.

I circle that farmstead still,

see it from a distance

gilt-framed by decades—

the yellow glow of the kitchen

where we cooked at the tacky counters,

the goats in the barnyard,

the leghorn hen,

the mutt we loved.

I see it like a painting I want to live in.

O, trickster,

I was happy there.

I was happy on that farm with her.

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