Constitutional

(O. G., 1872–1962)

 

It’s a wonder they didn’t all of them die of the

               sun those days. Remember

Ole’s forehead and the backs of his hands?

The fair-haired sons of Norway in their bright

               Wisconsin fields, the map

 

of blessed second chances writ in tasseled

               corn. (The damage writ

in melanin.) I never could stand it, my father

would say, by which he meant the morning

               constitutional: the dose

 

of electric fencing Ole found was just the

               cure for frozen joints.

But joints be damned, the rest of it my father

loved, he’d cast about for a portion I

               could manage, maybe

 

Linda could fetch the cows. Poor man. He little

               thought how quickly

the race declines. Ourselves and our posterity.

It all alarmed me: dung slicks, culvert, swollen

               teats, the single narrow

 

wire above the barbed ones, commotion

               of flies on the rim

of the pail. We’re better at living on paper,

some of us, better at blessings already

               secured. The fence?

 

It was for animals. And insulated, quaintly,

               with a species of porcelain

knob. That part, at least, I had the wit

to find benign, like the basket of straw-flecked

               eggs. A touch of homely

 

caution in the liable-to-turn-on-us world.

               Ordain and establish.

And breakable too. An old man at his battery-

charged devotions, double-fisted on

               the six-volt fence. In order

 

to form. A measure of guesswork, a measure

               of faithful refraining-from-

harm, let us honor the virtues of form.

And all the dead in company, if only

               not to shame them.