Carriage House Lavender Field, Sherwood,
Pastel, by John Cummings
WELL BUCKET
holed by a kid with .22
yawns in the cellar hole,
the farmhouse burnt
before his father was born.
No grail, it isn’t useful.
What’s to like that’s this empty,
open to notions, or stones,
while we stand on the granite edge,
peering down?
It has these holes in it,
gets shot by pencils of morning light,
sometimes moonlight, and pees rain,
gapes under blackberry canes
just leafing out, about to hide it
for another summer
with the rusted double bed’s
coil springs.
______________
Paul Nelson
Review by Jared Pearce
I really enjoy this poem’s images that certainly recall my visiting the cabin my grandfather was born in, the cistern from which he drew water, and the other rusted-out treasures my cousins and I would find scampering that old patch.
Review by Dave Mehler
After a sonnet about Love, and now this one, Paul is writing some high quality work. This one features an ode to a well bucket, which is synechdoche for the decay and emptiness inherent in a once worked farm, now abandoned, leaving only humiliated traces which become transformed by the wealth and beauty of sky (the finite vs. the nearly eternal). I love how the farm seems under attack from the sky and earth: blackberries hiding its cavities, and the well bucket as a source of life leaking due to the neighbor boys’ .22 such that weather now makes the bucket pee moonlight, rain, or morning light. This is some serious Frost territory, and the distance between Maine and New Hampshire very small. Excellent work, Paul!