after Jonathan Raban, Bad Land
They left in a hurry. No time or need to take boots,
hats, cotton dresses still in the closet, thinner,
paler than the day they arrived, smelling of cities
and streetcars—
paper lies blown into corners: odd catalog pages,
dead-end sums pencilled onto torn up letters
from the bank. A whisper of mice in the seat
cushions, once-neat
curtains drifting over windows without glass.
He had staked out their half-section, built her a home,
a barn and a henhouse, a new life, a hard life.
Set traps for coyotes—
they laughed together for as long as they could,
under a million stars. Now a pittance of sky
comes in through the roof, its timbers bullied
each winter by snow.
Tools and plough rust in the barn. Beyond,
a hundred miles without a tree or neighbour,
without an inch of grass. Gone the barn-raising,
gone the seed-sharing.
Was it bad luck or bad advice, or too many days
the same, was the land too big to fit their eyes,
did loneliness squeeze them dry of hope, was life
too short for them to stay—
