Airplane Hill

My father is a big man
so big he once
heaved the kitchen table
out the front door
of our sturdy red-brick
single story home

did so easily

and with such velocity
it splintered impacting
the lawn and continued on
manic tumbleweed
that cleared the horizon

I hauled a folding card table
from the basement
and wiped it down
with bleach but couldn’t
get the smell out of my nose

So we moved to the floor
still holding the outline,
meals taken without four legs

It was after this that my father
took my hand and we
walked up the hill and through
the wheat field
to the trailer park at its edge
serpentine s-curves
occupying a long narrow middle
abutted by a single lane of tarmac
for the amateur pilots
whose single props buzzed low
for the landing

I remember we were looking to rent

It’s easy to paint grain
in golds imbue it with luster
forget the soil and pig shit
but where it met the landing strip,
I found it glinting in the
wake of engine exhaust
the stalks gilded by sunlight and mirage

And this is impossible
which is to say:
single props don’t weave great wakes

I cannot say
if this is present memory
playing field medic
or child’s imagination,
a-not-knowing if the paint is still wet

This is a liturgy of finding
which is to say:
it is child’s piety

Which is to say:

I would dig in the soil seeking incantations

ablutions in the muddy stream

common stone found and named talisman

I would remember all this with hot cheeks
and sweaty palm in my father’s hand
passing scrub yards
like so many slipped discs
the vertebrae gone
rectangles 10 by 30
the insides
plastic and stain and rot

I stayed in that same sturdy
red-brick ranch house
until I left home

One year later
a tornado tore
the whole field
and each lot from its foundation

did so easily

They would find the residents
ten years a field
eyes still swiveling
shiny and concussed

Which is to say:
there was no tornado
but the rest is true