ANDREW GRACE
Dinner for Threshers
Grant Wood, oil on hardboard,
1934
Noon. A thresher waits
to
wash the debris from his face into
a stone bowl.
His hair is stiff
with lice. A rooster
missed its hour, tries
to
scream the sun back down; it is Iowa,
1892. A draft horse the color
of
zinc tongues it own shadow.
The thresher is about to join a table
of
men--fourteen of them, as in the Last Supper--
in
the house
for lunch. The string
of Xs
formed by the
backs of the men's overalls marks a negation.
They lift the offering to their
mouths: blood, flesh;
coffee,
rabbit.
+++
Their minds are on process:
thrash,
shake, winnow. Two thousand
bushels bagged in a pigeon-crusted loft.
Two
thousand to go.
Man
in the hopper,
man
on the stack of moth-gutted
wheat. Two horses lashed
to the ends
of
a rafter, the drugged circumference
of their labor turns the machine.
The man in the
hopper
pushes
wheat into a chute, which separates
grain from
chaff. A boy clears the waste.
A
shroud of white moths rises
from
his arms.
+++
The thresher's
forehead is the color of torn roots, his face
and neck empurpled by sun, spelled only by quick
reshufflings of cirrus.
He is not
unhappy, only
afflicted by variables. Hail,
rust,
blight, eyespot,
black chaff,
pink seed, flood, endless depth of sky, endless dark of his
bedroom
in which the eye drowns.
+++
Ornate
wallpaper, the smell of cooked meat
like
the flush of warmth back
to a cold extremity:
women bring bowls
to the table, men in
fellowship
with men as a reward for labor.
But for
every spotless rack
of
cerulean china
there
is a night
when the rooster
conjures a false dawn;
in
its intervals
silence
rages in the English garden;
candle
flames like commas
prolong the dark. This
is why
aprons
are bleached daily,
why the barn is scrubbed
as reclamation from
scat
and sun, why
each man asks for more meat, more labor
as
if bodies
are made to be consumed.
+++
To chew the roots of cowbane
is a way out. Laudanum under
the sink
is
a way out. Also,
the concept
of
being a metaphor
for
wheat:
when
torn open: raw, prone material
that broken across
a machine or a winter
is malleable
to
any
use; touch me and blue shale beneath
us is tamped an inch
towards
the underworld.
What
if they did not want
a way out? Night’s
oaks swallow wrens, so dark
the barn
is imperceptible. To sit at that
table
emptied of its men is to
learn to take solace in what pours
from
the window’s open mouth.
+++
The last man raises
his face from the
bowl. The prairie
is both hurtling and
standing
still. It will
not
rearrange itself no
matter
how deeply he scrawls his attention
over it. He takes in the thick
concussions
of light.
He is drawn
back to the barn
and past it, where
pheasants explode
from
the ditches. He is not hungry
anymore. Someone will
take his seat
at the table. Someone will lower their head
and ask
the Lord to be made
more bare to the sun.
A clot of moths
unravels
across the man's eyes. He
asks for no other
veil over
the stillness.
And the
Lord
provides.
TYPO 11