Rain on a Barn South of Tawas
It may be as close as an old man in Michigan
comes to the sound of the sea. Call it thunder
if you want, but it’s not thunder, not at all.
It’s more like the rush of semis on a freeway
somewhere between Bay City and Flint,
the road a son will take when he learns,
sometime around the last taste of a strap,
that the life he was born to is nothing
at all like a life he’d ever bother to live.
There’s an anger in it, a tin-edged constancy
that has no rhythm, quite, something more
like white noise that still won’t let you sleep.
Think of some man, needing to get a crop in,
but the fields are sop, so he’s trying to find
something to fix, something to keep his hands
working, something to weld, something to pound,
something to wrap his calloused palms around
that might do less damage than a lead-rope
knotted and tossed over the limb of a tree.
If you ever decide to lose your years
by working this land, you might think again,
about the barn you build, or roofing it with tin.
Copyright Credit: Poem copyright © 2012 by William Jolliff, whose most recent book of poems is Searching for a White Crow, Pudding House Publications, 2009. Poem reprinted from the Blue Collar Review, Winter 2012-13, by permission of William Jolliff and the publisher.