Fort Plain by Lena Rubin

"I am asking language to do what it can’t."

LENA RUBIN
Fort Plain

She gives me an electric saw and planks
of pine, and I run long, smooth, slow passes.
She teaches me to keep a strong core,
to hold it between my feet as it revs.
I straddle the machine, an excitable
animal. I take sandpaper to the wood
and even the grain.

The old dog pounces on me.
Flies buzz around him,
circling the scabs on his haunches.
In the painting above the door,
pastel-shaded cloud-sheep
loaf about a blue-green pasture.

I am asking language to do
what it can’t.
To be the handsome figure
who comes from his hidden grotto,
dripping with sea water,
to make love to me.
I batter down his door,
providing nothing in return.

At the demonstration farming
village, a man stacks chunks of
coal into the forge.
He pumps the bellows
and inserts the rough iron
into the fire, which emits
jagged sparks as it is shaped.

He takes a horsehair brush
to burnish the iron clean, his hands
gloved with soot, his heavy apron.
There is no shiny veneer,
no one to sweep me off
my feet. But there is the rough
work. There is the molten core.

First published in Afternoon Visitor