The Yale Review

1 1 3 R L A N D S C A P E W I T H F I G U R E S P A R T I A L L Y E R A S E D D . A . P O W E L L First, it’s just the faces disappearing. Because, deflected, as the faces long have been, with their hunched trunks and mercilessly twisted necks, they can only be regarded from a ground’s-eye view. The bellwort tips its fallow head down in the hot tomato field. The green snake rests beneath the green leaves, and the air is toast brown. Diesel tractors grind to the road and idle there, their heads bowed, too, like giant wooden horses meant to sack an unsuspecting city. Down come the earthen walls. My father used to pour libations onto the ground from the gas pump’s nozzle, and I’d swirl its iridescence, respire it into my lung’s core, so woozy, so sick, and awed by the vapors. Fire beguiled me, too. As did the concept of force. Whole villages burned in a single spritz. Even now the past gets altered. We forget because our friends won’t su√er that subject again. Because the students tap their pens uncomfortably, look around to see if anyone else is taken in. That’s when we figure it’s best to make a joke. 1 1 4 Y I’ve wandered, now, from the corrugated sheds, with people half in and half out of nuclear range. My retention of facts is not a silo. Even if it were, some disrepair gets fallen into. I like to think we dismantle thought as much as tortuous thought dismantles us. I have seen sharp men lose limbs. Women too. A hand pulled o√, conveyed into the hopper. But these were country matters. Like frilled silhouettes of flowering wild carrot, white against the mackerel white sky, the texture is imperishable, the details so far o√. These bodies: their contours uncertain. Just a general cast to the light. ...