Learning to Hit the Knuckle-ball,
Mercer County, Kentucky, 1960

—for Don Boklage

Late summer in the shade
of the hulking tobacco barn,
listening to the drone
of fat carpenter bees,
their electric whine
drilling precisely round
tunnels into the barn’s oak timbers,
I crouch in perfect stance,
Louisville Slugger shouldered,
waiting to knock
the darting black and yellow
spheres over the garden fence
and trot the base paths
to the cheering of tomatoes
and the standing adulation of corn.

**

Vespers

Twilight, the time
that is neither,
and the barn opens
its dark cavern to the evening.
The day has given itself
to the cool cathedral of shadows.
The barn swallows
take to their mud nests, leaving
the grey sky to the bats
darting and swooping
beneath the eaves.
The air is assaulted
by the cacophony of aromas,
alfalfa in the loft, the ferment
of silage, ammonia and muck,
steam lifting from the dark mass.
Cows lean their great weights
against one another
and rattle their hornless
heads against the feed trough.
The suck of their hooves
in the mud stirs the sour soup
of sounds, dogs howling
in the distance, the low cluck
of hens taking to roost,
the plop-plop of manure,
the burp and chew of cud,
and the soft mew of kittens
nestled in the dark recesses
beneath the manger.
They arch their tiny backs,
hiss and spit, and flash
their fishhook claws
at any intruders
in this sanctuary.

**

Singer

Summer afternoons when the sun is low
I remember the second-hand
sewing machine my father purchased
for my mother, how it ruled the dining room
from its place before the window.
I think of the long-ago late light
filtering through lace curtains
to illuminate my mother,
her sitting in the ladder-back chair,
attention devoted to the machine,
moist drops glistening on her forehead
as she leans forward, rocking
while both feet pump the treadle,
and I hear the whirr, see the shimmer
and shimmy of the filament as it unspools
to fill the silver bobbin with khaki,
the color of my father’s trousers.
I remember the treasure
of pearl and gold buttons and zippers
that overflowed its slender drawers,
the wooden spools of every size and color,
folded patterns of tulle and herringbone,
the sweet aroma of machine oil.
And I remember my father
one evening unloading the old Singer
from his Studebaker pickup,
the sweat of satisfaction on his face
as he placed it again before the window.
There, he said, presenting it to my mother,
its treadle gone, replaced by a small foot switch
to control its new electric motor.
Today, I offer tribute to my mother
for her years of toil, for her thrift,
for the eggs she traded for material and thread
at the general store, for the shirt
made from a chicken feed sack that I still wear
in my second grade photograph,
for my gym shorts made from boxers
on which she sewed red piping,
for every bead of sweat,
for every last stitch of breath.