I enjoyed reading Wendell Berry’s poems in the fall [2006] issue. Although you don’t often print poetry, I have sent two of my poems for your consideration, should you see your way clear to include additional poems in a future issue.

Although I taught in the creative writing program at UNC Charlotte for years, family and the land have constantly urged me back to Maryland and northern Virginia. “Smoke” was triggered by a barn fire near my parents’ farm situated a couple of miles from Daisy in Howard County, Maryland. Our farm was enrolled in the land preservation program, but others, including the one cited in the poem, were not so lucky.

“Cold Saturday” was inspired years after the fact by my summer job as a helper for Jack Matthews, of Sparks, Maryland, who sheared and dipped sheep throughout Maryland, lower Pennsylvania, and northern Virginia in the early ‘60s.

Although it is painful to contemplate all that has been lost already, your organization helps keep hope alive.

—Robert Waters Grey, Concord, North Carolina

The letter writer is a professor emeritus of English from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Smoke

On one of those rare
Sunday summer mornings
when the sky was close
enough to earth for both
to speak in the intimate
tongues I had long forgotten
but still understood, I swept
through waves of seasoned alfalfa
hay which swirled together behind me
swelling my senseless wake shut in a green
rush which buoyed up the red-patched wings
of blackbirds skimming the contours of lightly
showered air. Pens of Ayrshire calves, sloughed
from their mothers’ swollen udders for weaning,
bawled for the chance to nurse a merciful farmer’s
dry thumb, as groundhogs, balancing scruffy bodies
on raw mounds of burrowed earth, lifted their paws
to the climbing sun, and skittish does, trailed
by raised white tails and speckled fawns, cleared
fences and were folded into the buzzing woods.

While it was still
too bright and new
for worry, too early
for clapboard churches
to ring their congregations
into the light, a light gray
breath curled up the easy day
like a faintly pulsing umbilical
spiraling down from a newborn cradled
high in the stratosphere, but the cord
curdled black in a flash, as if the infant,
bent on urgent growth, had sucked the rest
of its mother up through the tangled ropes
of her own intestines. Although slow to sense
anything wrong, my eyes were blown wide open
as unheard eruptions beyond the woods spewed
throbbing hawsers of smoke braiding themselves
together into a wheeling column which eclipsed
the sun. On normal work days, the fat smoke
might have signaled the first blind strike
of a suburb launching its mission to scorch,
level, and choke yet another underdeveloped
plot, or a scraggly ridge of farm debris
and downwood banked with shredded tires,
drenched with gasoline and torched,
could have fueled such heavy gloom.

No blaze broke through the green buffer,
but prayers for a placid Sunday went up
in smoke when someone close to the source
was roused enough to raise an alarm. Sirens
shivered the silence as volunteer firefighters,
hot on the scent, set off half-cocked from all
directions following blind leads to dead ends
on back roads before they joined the company’s
engines already pumping at the fire’s correct
address. Further readings of smoke confirmed
it had mushroomed from an aging barn following
former owners into the sky, while flashing news
that carcass-pickers and realtors, who routinely
eyed the promised lands of the dying and newly
dead from a civil reach, would rise from ashes,
eager to rearrange the face of the earth.

Probably arson,
I thought. Leaning
against a pale, family
barn which was passing
through the hands of a new
generation, I kept a healthy
distance while keeping watch
as the morning’s snarled mass,
already steamed into wooly puffs
by pond water, shrank to a thin
wisp sweating an acrid funk. Once
bells had tolled parishioners home
and the day had lapsed into blank
silence, I let my worst fears bury
themselves, settled down to a late
breakfast, and strained not to hear
the clutch of raptors anchored to
blunt stubs of a dead tree hugging
the edge of a reaped and raked but
unbaled barley field, over which
they watched like hawks for signs
that their nerve-wracking cries had
seared enough terror into the hides
of concealed prey to flush out small,
edible creatures skittering through
the ghostly, windrow straw.

Cold Saturday

was the name of a farm
somewhere in the first tier
of counties to the north or
west of Baltimore. The owners
doubtless bred something there,
but we never knew if they raised
lamb or wool, because they never
invited us in to shear and dip sheep
as we toured the state in a gawky green
rig sporting a collapsible ramp attached
to a tank welded onto a pickup’s chassis
which often surprised drivers off the road.
After I had sweettalked, cursed and rammed
the stubborn, bedraggled sheep to the top
and goosed them over the edge, Jack, with
his shepherd’s crook, dragged them through
the reeking vat of milky dip. Although
instrumental in implementing federal
programs to eradicate scabies mites,
we favored hallucinations retched
from overtaxed brains which long
before then should have been
put out to pasture.

I was absorbed by the homemade
sign when we rattled through early
summer haze into the overwhelming
work-week heat which salved us with
coats of lanolin, sweat, and manure
while we labored among skittish flocks
in close, stuffy pens sweltering under
tin roofs. Those two, cryptic, simple
words hung in space from chains bolted
to a crossbeam at the mouth of a gated
lane which crooked immediately into woods.
Feeling no need to know more, I daydreamed
of living specifically there, until time
felt compelled to carry me off into space.

Cold Saturday
where I am most
at home with myself
wherever I am remains
and becomes an absent
ageless sweep of Maryland
countryside in late October
on the day of the week which
always wears the most comfortable
clothes. With still more of my most
visible breath, I fill the deepest
pockets of cold air with whatever
I have kept for sorting and saving
to help me make sense of it all—
including the afternoons when twigs
and evergreen needles raked my naked
eyes at a downslope-plunging gallop,
as the leather of an English saddle
and lather from a thoroughbred’s
ribs sheared my calves of hair
and skin, yet allowed me, as
my steaming breath was spent,
to inhale a breathless
breathtaking sky.

Cold Saturday
is the day when
time is simply a
measure of nothing.
Free from having to
make amends or prepare
for what will come, and
while I continue to live
with choice, conflict,
and compromise, on any
day of the week which
is or becomes a cold
Saturday, I am sure
from cell to spirit
that I am alive.