Like a chain, one could travel down
the smoke rising through the barn window
to the pipe, and through the pipe to
the lungs, which tell the true story.

Comb the rats out the corn. Comb
the rats out the barn. Comb them out
into tangled wheat grass
across the yard and down the creek.

In the barn loft among the hay the purpose
of a nipple is no simpler than a rough kiss.

Below, the tobacco shed is packed with leaves.
The leaves are like drying dreams
in the barn. The more one banks in the drying shed,
the more the drying shed knows.


**

Five-hundred pounds of tobacco bought one man
from another in 1665. Five-hundred pounds
of what would be nothing
unraveling out of a gentleman's pipe

For the better part
of a decade John Whitaker banked away
five-hundred pounds of tobacco to remove his X
from Maryland.

Shut the forest down behind you. Shut the woods
out. Close the forest forever.

**

From the high perch on top
of the hay, tobacco's sweet teeth bites through
the tang of after-touch, the tang of one person's sex
on another. The wind carries in it
and the nose carries it away.

Six on Sunday. Two tomorrow. The tobacco 
shed is dry. The Tobacco
shed is feverish. Rats rake
the eaves. Across their backs
fleas doze and infect
the leaves. The leaves
dry like dreams in the drying house. At the end
of the day the leaves are a little less
than what they were in the morning.

When it goes up in smoke there's something familiar
about the blue Qs and curls somersaulting
and circling. The familiar way the butt
rests between the fingers like a pen or gun.

Comb the rats out the corn. Comb the rats out
the barn. Comb the rats into the wheat grass.
Tangle up a long girl in the hay. She won't come
until the rats have gone.
			  From the hay-mounds
the drying shed peals off a sharp wind.
The barn is next to the tobacco shed
When you sweat in the barn's high lofts
it smells like yellow leaf.


**

In the back of 1665
John Whitaker, Johnny Welsh Back, Johnny Rye
and Johnny Smoke. Smoke curling out his pipe
as he carves a new pipe on the timber porch stoop.

Inside, his wife Mary sweeps dust out the back

Collect and tie. Tie and bale. Untie and re-tie.
Hang in small bunches. The leathery wings curl
outward as the shed opens and closes. Leaf flaps
and flutters, awakened by high-pitched
wind and sun.
		Collect and tie. Tie and bale.
Untie and re-tie. Hang in the shed. 500
pounds of tobacco stashed in the bank.

John Whitaker imagines rats in the dry shed,
imagines rats smoking his crop. Rats with little hands,
little pipes. Finds curious pipe curled twigs
on the floor of the shed. They are blackened at the ends.


**

500 pounds. Five-hundred
pounds. Mary could only count to twenty.
500 stretched to the ends of the world.

Thousands of spread palms stuck together.
500 pounds of what would be nothing
unraveling out of a gentleman's pipe.

John Whitaker learned to add. John Whitaker
looked in the tobacco shed at the end
of the day and swore his shadow leapt
from the tied bunches, the thousand hands.

In the end Mary had walked off the timber porch
and up the wagon's perch. Pennsylvania, a bounce
up the trail and a week of weak coffee and diarrhea.
Behind them the shack sank into the field.
The shack sank under Maryland
and the wagon moved over the great arc of the sky.

Close the forest down. Leave it behind.

John Whitaker's chain of smoke reached back
behind them. Reached all the way back to Maryland.
Back to the coast and beyond the coast,
across the Atlantic, back to Wales,
smoke chained them home.

**

Nearly four hundred years later Uncle Pete
reconstructed the barn from old sketches
and planted seed from the same stock
            Aunt Ruth claimed
pulled the family out of Maryland. Once under
glass there's truth to it. Aunt Ruth's photos,
and photocopies of documents, yellowed
leaves in Bibles. She sketched the family back
to Wales, the tobacco bales, the family pipe.

The barn has long grown under like a bad toenail
and now lies under the callused wraps of kudzu
and vine-wood. The high open window mouths an O.
The dry shed is a shadow in the wheat grass
where fire touched it one low afternoon in October.
Gentle tapping against the door. An old friend
leaning through the flapping screen to find the old
woman asleep. The old woman's dreams
          tied above her.	

 

;

;{text}