Iowa Exotica
- Dennis Hinrichsen
What drove Lorca to the caves to the gypsies drives me
to this—
slap of the pig feeder those summer nights
we stayed late at the farm my father’s
brother worked—
the highest point in Clinton County—
so we could look down slope at the other farms,
the silos, the out buildings rising
the way Kansas rises—all false church, grained Vatican.
The smell of the corn acreage
like a pulverized ocean.
I am coming out of one way to behave
into a plowed cornfield,
a poet said.
I am moving through culverts and creeks,
one whole afternoon playing with toads,
or stepping among the cattle to touch the silken afterbirth.
Did we root the animals out
with hooks and chains?
Was there a horse named Dolly?
A pig hung and the pig cut,
flank hair swimming the bottles
of cooling milk?
My father said this once:
two moccasins turned the whole thing Egyptian
one August when he was 9.
He never went back there to being a boy,
each callus softening to invisible pearl.
I Lorca the moments. I gypsy
time. All those lost Sundays praying
and getting shit on our shoes.
An entire year of clouds in an afternoon.
The town names, Elvira, Calamus,
like dollops
of mud on the tongue.
Wind kicking up tornadoes of dust
on the washboard roads.
A lone farmer, lone
samurai, elbowing his Allis Chalmers
in a banked field,
dog yipping in the just-opened cuts.
My poor land, my Leadbelly, my field song.
Dennis Hinrichseno has won numerous awards and grants for his poetry. He teaches creative writing at Lansing Community College. This poem is from his new book, “Rip-tooth.” It’s his 6th book and won the 2010 Tampa Poetry Prize. Two of his other books won the FIELD and Akron Poetry Prizes. He will be reading and selling his new book at the Creole Gallery on May 4th at 7:30 pm.
