By All Lights: 1959
for Larry Levis
Across from the tract of cinderblock houses
in Colusa County, California, each summer comes on
like a seizure. The skies blanch sulfur
above the locked gray Lutheran church. Next door,
old man Westcott mows the tall mustard forever,
the earth’s sharp breath stalling in air around him,
Sutter’s iron buttes racked in heat above the stunned river.
Not himself again, he raises his one fist,
horsing the John Deere with the other.
Soon, my mother lets me skid the black Pontiac on
gravel past the strange new safflower crop
where the town’s only cop waves us over.
She’s beautiful getting out of a ticket that Thursday.
This afternoon, under the almonds smudged with magpies
and Lucchesi, incorrigible, sprawled
on the culvert’s dry bank, I ditch my bike on a dare
and cut unseen across the disced field,
slide wheezing in clod and stubble
before the old father who revs the green tractor along the rows,
closing in on what faint imprint my hips
and shoulders leave in that soil,
plowing under whatever it is, that thirteenth August,
dust blind and shuddering in furrows,
I refuse to become there.
B. H. Boston
