Good Works, and: Harvest

Abstract

Good Works, and: Harvest Matthew Moser Miller (bio) Good Works i Last month, we got a letter— its upper corner pasted with rows of old penny stamps— from a man asking to visit his grandfather’s grave. The words thin, shaky on loose-leaf in what looked like fountain pen. We told him it’s no trouble; say, twice a year? So now we are cutting at the poison ivy snaking sprawling oaks, clearing months-dead leaves off the ground— bark scraping knuckles as we hack ash saplings grown on the grave. [End Page 121] You warn me not to touch the marker— its surface concaved, epitaph in flakes at the base, but its edges rounded and whole, moss-stained black. The angel, wings long crumbled, crouching on the gravestone with no name to guard. ii Because it was the fifth one whisked away with only blood to mark its passage, and because it was his nature, my father swore and stamped, returned that night with a live trap—wire measured, framed at angles and blackcoated against rust— for the coop. Baited it with cat food, steeped and stewing in July’s thick dusk. But we caught only cats, locked them up, until one day he called, echoing off the hills and peeling barn. I found my father there, the raccoon a mewling blue-gray-silver circle [End Page 122] darting around the trap and just the color of his hair. He left me to guard it, off to get the rifle that he’d never had cause to use. Terrified, at nine, of ricochets and the way lead worked on limestone, I offered to run for cord, tie the trap safely to a wrist, and leave it die in the pond. He said no, that we couldn’t trust the baler twine, soaked through with water, to bear the weight. iii When his mother gave me his clothes, I didn’t know what to do with them. Three button-downs striped with versions of blue that he, made lean and hardened into a new and always faithful body, no longer fit. He won’t need them, she says, quick to qualify when he comes back. Won’t need them [End Page 123] because fashions change, because new-tattooed arms would stretch at seams; but not because he’ll meet some dark-eyed girl in Kandahar, and love her before he can say it in Pashtu, and not because those milk-scarred poppies taste, not unfamiliarly, of home. And never because he might not need them, might be broken by some cave’s collapse or fade, vaporized, into mountain air. These are not— we cannot say—the reasons; only some clothes he will not need because he—we—have grown small. [End Page 124] Harvest We gathered apples from bent and inherited trees. We searched the grass for bones. Every night, we counted the promise of tongues. My father cut me a drum’s frame we never put skin to. I hoped for years to find it—stretched, thrumming, a breath—finished, but it was lost. To find it, I took you beneath an oak no ancestor of mine planted and pretended to stare through its arms at the stars’ spent grain. I gave you a ring an old man pulled from a grave. Tell me when to search—the moon’s warmed phase, the best darkness. Tell me what, when we put a finger to it, answers back. [End Page 125] Matthew Moser Miller Matthew Moser Miller is a born-and-raised Ohioan. He studied creative writing at Denison University and the University of Aberdeen, where he received Aberdeen’s Calder Prize for Poetry. He holds an mfa from the University of Michigan, where he was a Hopwood Award winner and a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing, and his work can most recently be seen in the Journal, Mid-American Review, and Michigan Quarterly. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press