Rodney Jones

The Assault on the Fields

It was like snow, if snow could blend with air and hover,

     making, at first,

A rolling boil, mottling the pine thickets behind the fields,

     but then flattening

As it spread above the fenceposts and the whiteface cattle,

     an enormous, luminous tablet,

A shimmering, an efflorescence, through which my father

     rode on his tractor,

Masked like the Martian or a god to create the cloud where

     he kept vanishing;

Though, of course, it was not a cloud or snow, but poison,

     dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,

The word like a bramble of black locust on the tongue, 

     and, after a while,

It would fill the entire valley, as, one night in spring, 

     five years earlier,

A man from Joe Wheeler Electric had touched a switch

     and our houses filled with light.

Already some of the music from the radio went with me 

     when the radio was off.

The bass, the kiss of the snare.  Some of the thereness

     rubbing off on the hereness.

But home place still meant family.  Misfortune was a well 
     of yellowish sulfur water.

The Flowerses lived next door.  Coyd drove a road grader

     for the county.

Martha baked, sewed, or cleaned, complaining beautifully

     of the dust 

Covering her new Formica counters.  Martha and Coyd,

     Coyd Jr., Linda, and Jenny.

How were they different from us?  They owned

     a television,

Knew by heart each of the couples on Dick Clark’s

     American Bandstand.

At dust Junior, the terrible, would beat on a cracked 

     and unfrettable Silvertone guitar.

While he pitched from the top of his wayward voice

     one of a dozen songs

He’d written for petulant freshman girls. ‘Little Patti,’

     ‘Matilda,’

‘Sweet Bonnie G.’ What did the white dust have to do 

     with anything?

For Junior, that year, it was rock’n’roll; if not rock’n’roll,

     then abstract expressionism –

One painting comes back.  Black frame.  Black canvas –

     ‘I call it Death,’ he would say,

Then stomp out onto the front lawn to shoot his .22 rifle

     straight into the sky above his head.

Surely if Joel Shapiro’s installation of barbed wire and 

     crumbled concrete blocks,

In a side room of the most coveted space in Manhattan,

     pays homage

To the most coveted space in Manhattan, then Junior

     Flowers’s Death, 

Hanging on a wall dingy with soot in North Albama,

     is a comment, too.

Are they the same thing?  I do not know that they are not

     the same thing.

And the white dust, so magical, so poisonous: how does it 

     differ from snow?

As it thins gradually over many nights, we don’t notice 

     it; once the golden

Carp have rotted from the surfaces of ponds, there is no

     stench to it;

It is more of an absence of things barely apprehended,

     of flies, of moths;

Until one day the hawks who patrolled the air over

     the chicken coops are gone;

And when a woman, who was a girl then, finds a lump,

     what does it have to do

With the green fields and the white dust boiling

     and hovering? 

When I think of the name Jenny Flowers, it is that

     whiteness I think of.

Some bits have fallen to clump against a sheet of tin 

     roofing 

The tornado left folded in the ditch, and the stoops there

     to gather

A handful of chalk to mark the grounds for hopscotch.