Alone and with the Others
       

When I was a boy and no love had yet been lost,
I'd fall almost asleep on a sofa
my grandmother called a davenport. It wasn't
so much the words I held in the afternoon darkness
I made from shutting my eyes and turning my face
to the afghan as the voices. My people. Like a light
here and there on a valley floor at night in the mountains.
Or the mountains themselves, abstracted to their forms
against moonlit sky. That was in Idaho, getting to be
a long time ago now. A small farmhouse,
standing, still, as it sinks into its cellar,
but never again to be lived in. I drifted
with them. The forest began outside at the edge
of a small, close field and went, I thought, forever.
Like those voices in the room around me would,
for all I knew. I know better now, of course,
here, on the far side of a day gone past dusk
in the Scottish Highlands, with family I had yet to find.
My cousin Campbell's about the age I was then.
He and I take turns running the bail wrapper
while his dad backs and swings the tractor's headlights
to load each fresh one. Pull this lever and
the bail spins, round into the black wrap
like a dying star. Cut it with the razor knife
and tuck the end in tight. Pull that lever
to dump, leaving the smell of hay and emptiness
on the turntable, ready for the next. The boy and I
take turns, three bails each. His go is long enough
for me to leave the diesel growl and gear whir
and walk the narrow road alongside the stone wall
with the moon rising over ridgeline and turn
at the gate and cross the fresh cut field that's the floor
of this deep glen to where the moon sinks away
and the voices of the machines are small and far.
How can one life be one life? Where is then?
When I turn and walk back, I make the moon rise again.

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Copyright © 2019 Jonathan Johnson All rights reserved
from May Is an Island
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission