Summer Service, and: Psalm for Third Base, and: Above Oxbow Dam Luke Johnson (bio) Summer Service Our doors never locked Sundays, knowing Robin,an autistic boy from the congregation, liked to watch the ceiling fans go. I would find him,mousy and rapt, neck craned back feeling blades change speeds. Pale, quiet, he knew rooms.He skipped sacraments, missing the body for whirl. The wicker began to sink in the blade's middleand Robin soon came less, as if the fans were a miracle disproved, a once-great prizefighter swinging at ghosts.Do not pity him, my mother said, do not treat him like furniture. Talk. He's a boy. He seemed lessfixed on revolution, instead searching behind the blade, a space for an instant obscured then revealedover and over, knowing he'd seen the blank ceiling-patch before, but believing it could change,or just liking its blankness, a communion between boys and what seems then like magic.He will leave and we will move. The fans will be gutted or left as decoration, a relicof hot days after prayer when the spinning was impossible, and boys loosened tiesas if all they needed to believe was air. [End Page 99] Psalm for Third Base Fingers have their own prayers,often crossed, but also bunched in pockets for warmth or comfort:there, amidst the fumble and scratch of eager hands, there where verbstake root: touch, trace, fist. There in the back pew of a filled churchwith a skirt tented just so, a boy's fingertips graze inside, the sanctuary couchedin beeswax-smoke. There, the salvation of dim light, brass candelabras holdingtheir tarnished glow in the black flame just above the candlewick. It is thereat the back of the chapel with the choir singing hallelujah and angels on wallsshimmering fallen light that the boy receives what he expects from religion:fanfare, epiphany, movement. So it is there that the boy lingers, the edgeof where he's been before and what must come after: the present, what the gospelcalls the kingdom: her lips dusting his earlobe, whispering, breathing, as if she were chantingthat moment alone: there, there, there. [End Page 100] Above Oxbow Dam Rupert, Idaho Even the gas stations are beautifulin Rupert, but not for the obvious reasons. Not the Snake River feedingreservoirs that feed automatic waterers sputtering arcs over potato cropsyards from the diesel pumps, not ranges clawing horizonlike distant kingdoms of thought. Not the woman with her grandson:him crouched next to a truck-sized puddle swatting gravel at brown water,her tugging him back by his overall-bib when he edges too close. Not the manin his patchwork leather coat, tapping ashes on the bars of his Harley.We're not here together, mostly. It's a tale the land is telling: we aremomentary, always on the verge drawn both ways. It's the fisherman,a week earlier, sucked back from his raft into a diversion dam. The water therestays deep and dark. It is feeling only. It is the place running over itself. [End Page 101] Luke Johnson Luke Johnson is the author of After the Ark (NYQ Books, 2011). His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Epoch, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where he is working on a second collection. Copyright © 2011 Middlebury College Publications