“What separates a georgic from a pastoral

          is work. In a georgic, there’s no denying

          that work is being done.”

                    —Thomas Haddox 

My head is a calm auburn church. There is sun-nuzzled wash on the line

outside the parsonage. Songbirds are heart on heart in the fatherly arms

of an alder, but those hosannas you hear are not

their ambiencing. It’s just the villeins absolutely obliged to their twilight

vespers. It is indeed the choicest shank

of the evening & these endearingly snub-nosed folk in cordwood

slippers & flaccid hats are not kissing

cousins to dysentery & scrofula. There is no high plight, & not a soul is going steady

with jeopardy. On the brambled verandas—sipping lemon cordial, dandelion

& burdock—the gentry are of even temper. Their savorsome inhaling is not 

troubled by the downwind cheddar of abattoirs or cattle in deep

earthturning heat. Upholstered in the humid oblique

of night coming on, they don’t pay any care to their tenants

hoofing home. & what of those swagbacked Atlases, shouldering

the whole? The ebb of their talk is so wormbent it’s loveable, like a little boy sorely

missing his front teeth. They are in peak spirits, pudgegutted, pinky-nailing

the comeuppance out from between their own

like it’s daily bread. It might edge off chill, but that doesn’t matter—they’re shawled

in contentment. Their feet in clogs are brute as pumice, but they’re still moving

buoyant through the night. & it is complete & final black, but they are not

itinerant in this dark. Raw grace enunciates their going. These mudhusbanders, they know

there’s no cause to doggone their betters. After all, this flesh is something

we’re only pilgrim to.

——

I am half-batty to be among them. Maybe if I say it, it’s so. I am there. I am there

in star-crossed tandem with the least of them. & I would be grateful to forever

midwife a plow through unversed dirt—to just go on breaking

fetal ground—or wear like a sumptuous doublet

an armload of bees from the hives of my seigneur. Yes, that is an era & age I’d be

merry to happen into. Regardless, I’ll tell you where I’m not:

I’m not up to my wishbones in this dishwater

dawn, trying to shepherd with spade & prybar a D-8 bulldozer

back into flock on this mountainside

slathered in disagreeable weather. My old man does not look like a cosmonaut

in his blowtorch gown. He is not strapped haplessly into the cockpit

of capital, trying to rile the starter. The rank tension of jobs undone & an afloat

mortgage isn’t warbling his neck, shuffling his jowls, like he just entered

orbit. He didn’t just bawl me out, both barrels, for sagging the flashlight. & surely I am

not so soft-witted that I still offer my neophyte advice. He doesn’t have to keep

saying I’m shearing this goat, you just hold its head—which can be digested as enough

musing out of you. & at dusk, we won’t slink home, refuge

from success, in the same gruel-light. We won’t be so hangdog ashamed

that we scald the work off before quaking the threshold; we will not blight ourselves

to the elbow with lye. & unlike something in the back room

of a bad dream, my granddad will not be there swapping skin

for recliner felt. He is not in breakneck wilt, too much popcorn

lung to fog a mirror, & I won’t have to take shiving drags off a Winston

& pipe the smoke down the swollen ductwork of his throat. My father doesn’t steer

clear of us like an EPA edict. We are not just cellmates in this singlewide. & 

nobody, not a blessed one of us, will risk a glance at the competition

grade skeet-gun mounted above the furnace

above all else.