PaintingAuthor(s): Peter WildSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1977), pp. 62-63Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20158701 .

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shadowing us

we sUced our flesh from their shades

that cut away, the trees Ue

acquainted with the shadows of death:

for which there are words

and no language.

Give me your branches: the woodsman

handles their deaths: a blade and its haft.

Then us. Earth washes away. Leaf, leaf leaf

Uke treeless birds

Painting/Peter Wild

You left us with the frog pond and instructions to feed the horse meat

two times a week, merely to sit

if necessary, showing someone was there.

each night I sat under the dried tamarisks, starved men in raincoats, drinking my one beer,

watching the lightning form and dehisce

along the granite tops of the Catalinas, walked

through the rakes and chained carts, the toppled, unsurprised statuary, checking the studio, the side gate by the Mormon church, imagining in that house put together from everywhere some cousin mad with a desire she didn't understand

romping naked in the attic, her eyes, as in the movies, following me through the sUts,

while you sat on vacation in

the flagstone lodge on the North Rim

watching your husband before sunset

peer out wide-eyed over his moustache

through the medieval crenellations,

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go over to his corner to paint, when I stooped with the soggy meat I put each chunk

rolled up and stuck along the sides as you suggested,

stepped back to let the hideous turtles gUde out of the rushes, the last brown clouds on the water, to swallow the flesh from the world of air, and once getting brave put a ball of it

on the string you left, dangled it

over the place where a frog bigger

than my foot emerged, snapped it away like a monster grabbing the

heart of a virgin from a painting,

just Uke you said.

Barn Fires / Peter Wild

Summers we lay awake above the sweep of the pastures while the worms worked through the dry soil, voices climbing chamber by chamber into the old wood

of the neighbors' barns, until they spurted from a peak,

a tuft of owl feathers

with nowhere to go but the sky, and below at their confirmations the horses looked up, drew their Ups back at the rafters

turning to spirit, dancing with the Saint Elmo's fire

that one sees at last as a promise on a voyage, but no matter whose it was, we got there too late, to discover only the jaws of a tedder glowing red in a corner

among the ashes and bones, the blowing duff, the boulders

of the foundation taking their time cracking open,

just as the firemen arrived clinging to their yellow ladders

through the forest, stood in their uniforms lined up,

though next morning Uke prophets we had lived through our sadness,

waking to the new cows coming toward us between the hills one by one, the women having laid out blueberry pies and cheese on the boards, the fresh timbers leaping into place

before our hands as we moved them,

having the idea of it all the while in our heads.

63

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