The First Year | KEELY HENDRICKS

The First Year

KEELY HENDRICKS | VERMONT “What is a farm but a mute gospel?” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The old cabin had shrugged its shoulders and yielded to decay— the rotted walls bowed out and the wooden porch rolled with planks that arched their backs against the nails.

The cellar had become a gapped-tooth grin of missing cedar blocks, a perfect refuge for pregnant raccoons. Here, you smiled, I stake my future. There will be no nails in our home.

I love to watch your hands at work, like two small animals— at night they warm up to me, shy, soft creatures, fast to sleep in the heat of the burrow.

You’re an honorable man, as careful in the act of destruction as in the act of making. Love your land and you can only make her more bountiful, even though

you must burn wood to warm your hands, pluck the tobacco slug, string up the coyote, shoot the pig you watched suckle from its mother and open its warm heart. The whole world watches the way you

sweep your scythe, and decides to love you back. The collards in the skillet, blackberry moonshine, honey from your fingertip— all these things you fed me, and the timber grew to protect.

The clouds are angel wings, our pelvis bone of the rabbit. Whatever you touch bears meaning.