Nathan Erwin
NOVEMBER

I should be rocking my son to sleep,
but the leaves need burning. I think of my father’s shed 
of plundered antiques as fire. The lights in the house are off. 
Nancy must have finished painting the rocking horse. 
The Lyndsay’s have wrapped their last sick cow, creaking of cancer,
with a quilt. I met her golden eye earlier, over the fence, scraping 
elm bark with a tanning knife; she lay down in leaflets streaked 
with sky & copper steeples. The bark wrapped in primrose, 
bulrush & thistle. Tinder. & all last week,
the neighbors dressed as women or tulips or little lakes soon 
to be skated over; Halloweened across our wide country road.
Whatever I was then, I wish I could stay that, because men like me 
own nothing, really, hold onto secrets like dusts of gold. In the long walk
away from my father, I took only his silences, his harshness to touch,
indifference to grief & the smell of rain on asphalt. More homes go dark
in the valley, doubling doubling of Christmas lights. Why do I tend this fire? 
So the fox, cutting through the last few dry flowers in the field, will stop 
for a moment to smell smoke in the air. Or perhaps, to bring 
the last leaf in, smoldering, to light a candle toward morning snow, 
a new year, like any other. 
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Image by Kai Dewitt from Pexels
Nathan Erwin is a poet and land-based organizer from the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. He currently operates with the Pocasset Wampanoag tribe as they fight for land, food, & seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in the North American Review, Boulevard, The Journal, Gulf Coast, and Ninth Letter. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about foodways, myths, medicine, and wanting.
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