A Poem for a Thursday #187

B. H. Fairchild is an American poet. He was born in Texas in 1942 and grew up in Texas and Kansas. His poetry explores the “empty landscapes of his birth and the lives of its working-class residents.” Barbara Berman in the Rumpus said of Fairchild’s poetry, “Gritty meets exalted and gets the shadows just right.” I love the description and the beauty he conveys in the scene described in today’s poem.

I had to look up the word “Dumka.” According to Collins English Dictionary it is “a piece of Slavonic music that typically has abrupt changes in mood from sadness to joy.”

His parents would sit alone together
 on the blue divan in the small living room
listening to Dvorak's piano quintet.
They would sit there in their old age,
side by side, quite still, backs rigid, hands
in their laps, and look straight ahead
at the yellow light of the phonograph
that seemed as distant as a lamplit
window seen across the plains late at night.
They would sit quietly as something dense

and radiant swirled around them, something
like the dust storms of the thirties that began
by smearing the sky green with doom
but afterwards drenched the air with an amber
glow and then vanished, leaving profiles 
of children on pillows and a pale gauze
over mantles and table tops. But it was 
the memory of dust that encircled them now
and made them smile faintly and raise 
or bow their heads as they spoke about

the farm in twilight with piano music 
spiraling out across red roads and fields
of maize, bread lines in the city, women
and men lining main streets like mannequins
and then the war, the white frame rent house,
and the homecoming, and afterwards, green lawns
and a new piano with its mahogany gleam
like pond ice at dawn, and now alone
in the house in the vanishing neighborhood,

the slow mornings of coffee and newspapers
and evenings of music and scattered bits
of talk like leaves suddenly fallen before
one notices the new season. And they would sit
there alone and soon he would reach across
and lift her hand as if it were the last unbroken
leaf and he would hold her hand in his hand
for a long time and they would look far off 
into the music of their lives as they sat alone
together in the room in the house in Kansas.

The Dumka
B. H. Fairchild