Things That Are Distant But Close

by Michael Prior

 
A sawmill. A seiner. War’s
rations and barbed wire. A garden’s
trellised green beans, plots of shiso.
We plotted the temerities between.
Summer’s dust blooming through
a sawmill’s rotary teeth. The jar of gold

lozenges you held out to me. Later,
a book full of paper cranes. Dusk,
summer: a field burnt to curb the fires.
Goldfinches sparking between the alders.
Somewhere, smoke still curls
through your fingers. Sometimes,

a shower radio hanging from your neck,
you recited names I couldn’t hear,
stooped to tend the green. Green beans.
Zucchini. The sun, a gold lighter 
hung between two fingers. Shiso
embering my tongue. The smoke,

the dusty avenues, the egrets,
the ditches where the bullfrogs
swelled and murmured. Your paper
crane listing in a bowl of water 
like a man-of-war aflame. The slurs
they called you then. The names

of those who left, those buried
in the interior, on a strawberry farm
across a coastal plane. No egress
for the temerities between. Your rations.
Your names. The one you stole
from a baseball player, won

from the sawmill’s slick
and spinning pain. A finger. Two lungs
swollen with particulate matter.
It’s fine, I never breathed it in. This,
in a tongue you only spoke indoors. 
Outside, the field burns itself clean.

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