Past the Back Forty

I.

I started to learn what to ask for

in the ranch land behind the back forty of a neighbor’s place

among hidden oaks with burls the size of truck engines.

I often got what I wanted growing up.

Once, we’d made our bodies into a kind of bridge

as if we were crossing over from ourselves—

we had been found that way and glistening,

we were halfway to somewhere, cosmos in our eyes,

drunk with pleasure. And when my love

got grounded, I went where the big trees

of the valley dipped their long arms. I was mostly looking

down, hungry for beauty as it rose like steam

out from the deergrass as summer came on.

By the silence of animals watering, deep roots commingling,

the summer cliffs and their thorny brush,

I didn’t mean to be wherever I was headed.

Who when young is ready

for the soul’s blunt honesty, even a reflection

of the psyche on a farm pond? Plunking

waves, craters carrying away frog eggs

rafts on the greening water.

The fish were rising in the warm afternoon,

but I had never asked the old man

who caretook the land

to go so deep among the giant oaks and ponds.

Something in the trees, their knots feathered with first alien

leaves, had tried to warn me: I wasn’t supposed

to see it yet—but I knew it then: everything can read

us straight down to sinew, bone, a grist

beyond what it is we might have meant.

II.

The years came and went.

I saw my old love in the supermarket. Over coffee,

she said, When we were back there, running wild,

what passed for pleasure was a mask.

For me, it wasn’t an ecstasy, not yet . . . .

Looking off, she said she’d wanted me to know.

In the fairground parking lot where I learned to drive

a truck is selling oak, split

by the cord. Chainsaw grease has stained

the wood. Or was it the water inside the tree?

The kind that would grow tepid,

rotting the trunk until it split to a fetid gush.

The kind of thing I wouldn’t foresee—

how even the heartwood could be frail.

What could I have known of its current and grain,

running up and down the grove, around the pond,

gone behind the back forty, in love or alone,

with nothing on my mind but song?

Adam Michael Finney, a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA program, is living and teaching in the foothills near Yosemite. Recently, his poetry has been published in Allium, and his criticism has appeared in Cleaver.