Argosy
for Mike, US Army SP4
There was no horizon, only freight trains
and bean fields, low clouds that I’d squint
into mountains or oceans. Slow glower
of those boondocks, broken sidewalks
and fallow streets, the factory
setting our clocks.
And pale yellow tablets taking my ink—
dumb tracery of what I couldn’t yet see.
Long division and proofs, the attic breath
of my books. Their pressed words my
calendar, my compass, at eighteen.
But then my number
came up. Vietnam was burnt foliage and
fracture, bright birds I had no names for,
dank smoke we couldn’t exhale. All
those still bodies floating facedown
downstream, husks of belief.
My hand unsteadied,
so they sent me back home to Ohio where
I squared a circle in my grandmother’s
woods. Built a cabin, laid in a garden.
Sycamores standing sentry as I read,
worked my sums. Dream’s long net
dragging the river.
Psalms in the leaves a slow surround, Lord.
I have been cut off from the sight of your eyes.
But what lies in wait in the years you allot?
I miss the bite of the fall’s first green apples,
how our road parted the summer fields, a seam
between the same.
Workhouse
Patchwork of milk-glass, celadon, amber,
broken panes boot-blacked in the derelict brick.
When I dreamed it as a child, I called it the shoe factory.
Could feel the long lines of women seated within,
bent to their sepia stitching, the pierced scent of glue:
a building for piecework. My aunt at Goodyear,
forty years in that viscous air. Asbestos filaments
silting into Eddie’s lungs, gone at 32. My father
pulling double shifts at Ford for half his life.
The plant, he called it, which meant to stay put.
The factory stands in a field of scrub prairie
and ghost stones, moonlit fork of a river, parking lot
thistle-split. I’ve dreamed it for decades, resolute
edifice planted within, broken pattern of its windows
a cipher, a sentence I’ve tried to write away.
Once, when I wrote about my father at work, roar
of forges and presses, bright slivers of brass
in his hair, my teacher said Like a god.
Debra Allbery
Debra Allbery is the author, most recently, of Fimbul-Winter (Four Way, 2011), which won the National Book Prize in Poetry from Grub Street. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, a Hawthornden fellowship, and other awards, she joined the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 1995 and served as the program’s director from 2009 until her retirement in 2023.