American Pastoral
by John Sibley Williams
Again, the wind sings the laundry from the line.
Bleached of our stains, baptized by soap & sun,
by a once mighty river gone arroyo & a handed-
down washboard bartered for a grandmother’s
dreams, what we’ve worn to keep the world
from our bodies eddies out over the barbed
fence between neighbors, severing the gray
halo plumes of not-distant-enough factories,
all these empty pallets of shorn meadows,
deerless wood, clapboard churches & the holy
specters of fathers roped to stakes to terrify
the crows—all that hay & newsprint a symbol,
I’m told, for something: maybe witness, maybe rusty
hinge, home—maybe like contrails the t-shirt my brother
killed himself in & the overalls he once carved angels
into snow with & the wild whorls of my mother’s
chemo wig & the tutu my daughter whose body
thinks itself a boy’s cherishes like prayer; all
the houses we’ve built around the house we live in
my socks & underwear & regret & love just keep
whistling past like a hymn, a migratory bird, like
light before we divvy it up into ours/yours; before
piecing our myths back together into a history, there’s this
tender wind I tell my daughter she can hold in her hands.
John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A twenty-seven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.