When in the rainless weeks of summer the mulch pile dried,

and worms we hooked for bait would burrow

deeper than our reaching fingers could grope,

we’d sweep with bare feet the hay fields for grasshoppers,

and watch those great-legged jumpers climb top-most stalks

like sailors on sinking ships might slip up mast

and crow’s nest till water laps their pant legs and down they leap

to the waiting, unknown below—so grasshoppers

chanced the thick of weeds, edging past our clasped hands, too-slow.

We must have crushed a dozen, on accident, running

in the chest high grass, reckless in our search, caring little

if we caught the bugs, or any fish later for that matter.

We were content to take whatever

the day gave, thoughtless and happy.

for Lane Hyatt

The season was hard in drought

and the strawberries

my father planted suffered worst.

We were sent off for pine needles

hauled in trucks, settling

the straw under each patch;

it kept them, heads above mud

when rain would fall and soak the field

and swell the speckled reds.

But no rain that season

made our gathering and trouble-taking

fruitless. But our father sent us

to dig ravines from the creek so the water

pooled-in deep. He took when we were done

horse and plow and ranged

trenches to where the patch sat dry and low.

Later we gathered rocks to stop

the water in its flow, to govern

he said, what ran into the fields.

When the rocks were in place, he’d walk

from lane to lane, lifting up

at his farmer’s discretion each rock,

to loose enough to let the strawberries

drink, then stopper it back up.

Till midnight most nights that dry season

my father in place would stand

or walk along the patches,

and lift and weigh each one’s turn to drink,

replacing when he would and moving on

till all had had their fill—

***

My grandfather on the front porch

relates these facts of my inheritance—

of men, the ones like his father,

whose work kept a family fed:

I’ll never cease to be amazed;

all that was done here,

nodding to the lower field, where

cattle graze lazily, and the heat

of the day has browned the cut grass

where no strawberries grow,

the lane where his father paced,

running like a vein through the field.

My remembering of our fishing as posed in photos is different

from any official story, told off-hand, overheard

by me once in the bedroom looking

at the photo—me, maybe three or four holding a trout

easily half my height—my mother telling

how brother or grandfather steadied the rod,

reeled in, ready with net and scooping finally

that monster (their hands enfolding

my own clutched rod, then the net handle),

shouting how I’d wrangled this massive lie

myself, posing in my arms the evidence before

the final squelch and slap of scales on the cutting board,

the knock of the butt end of the knife blackening

the poor beast’s eyes before the inevitable,

mechanical gutting (tail to gills the slit split

and spilled the life of the thing) and my returning

to the present bedroom, still staring at the picture

now wholly new and therefore alien.

Who were these conspirators, and the mystery of fish?

The little boy, did I know him at all? Or is the reason

of what’s upheld only the unfolding

of what is withheld, chucked

like guts into the weeds of memory?