by Jenna K Funkhouser
Wind ripples off
the shaggy tops
of mesquite trees
and threads a ribbon
of bending grass. The ground
is stern and red like brick
except for the man-made trail
of gravel snaking
into the horizon.
There is a doorway
in everything. This
is what the man
who was nearly my grandfather
was saying
in so many words.
Men had lived here,
generations scraping
a life off the hard, red soil;
hope threaded through death
in weddings and hayings
and the soft ears of new
calves every spring.
There was a name
for everything and the hot earth
carried its ghosts and stories
like the hidden wells we searched
for under the blue grass.
It was a baptism of the mind,
a clothing of your eyes in the names
and histories which became the keys
to unlock the doors.
Then were the layers of story
stacked among the slow,
craggy mountains
and the wild plains
and the world became a cup
into which generations had poured
the unadulterated meaning
of their lives.
The cracked blue jug
on the porch steps
and the old barn
and the larkspur planted
by grandmothers past
are not happenstance, any more
than the crickets that sing
you to sleep in the summer nights.
They exist as part
of a speaking whole,
fragments of a story
we can choose to exit,
but can never be untold.
Jenna K Funkhouser is a poet and artist living in Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has recently been published by Geez Magazine, the Saint Katherine Review, and As It Ought To Be, among others; her first book of poetry, Pilgrims I Have Been, was released in October 2020.
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