Homestead

by RYLER DUSTIN

Rogue River Valley, Oregon

1.

Above the bed hangs a piece of sky
where a cedar waves its dark arms.
It’s said a cougar came
on nights like this
to watch the woman
who slept here, who led lovers
through miles of madronas
on mountain roads,
wild rhododendron
and two steel gates
swinging open and shut
like valves of a heart.

We imagine the cougar
peering down at us, paws
on the skylight’s edge,
its body an absence
of stars—

while from the mattress
rises a scent of damp wood, traces
of stories older than us.

2.

A man who wasn’t Dutch
they called Dutch Henry
cleared this land, nailed shakes

of cedar into a barn,
watered mules from a tub
by shrubs and wild mint.

He murdered his mining partner
and his wife before he fell
picking apples—shattered
his hip on a thick root.

He’s buried where mist
meets the meadow’s edge.
The bleak wreckage

of the barn still stands—
nests of nails,
a single sickle
catching sun
through the rotting roof.

3.

We hang a painting
about the sound of wind
inside two trees,

split and stack wood
by the Fisher stove
hauled up here fifty years ago,

clean mouse poison
from the crooked shelves.

A new wick fits
in the kerosene lamp.

The moon rises,
and bats as small as plums
slip from the barn’s dark seams.

4.

Wasps gather like dew
in the eaves of the deck,

tending nests of mud
sucked from froth
at the river’s edge

or spinning paper
from quivering jaws,
their bodies
distended
as blown glass.

5.

You stay up one night
to watch a wasp circle,
frantic, weaving
with a stuttering sound

the high white hive
of the harvest moon.

6.

For centuries this land belonged
to canyon oaks, bracken fern,
footsteps of families
of Tututni and Takelma—

then whites washed
the riverbanks away
with hoses, hunting gold
that was hardly there.

Silt settled in the riverbed’s
cool stones, suffocating
salmon and steelhead row—

a generation was buried
before it was born, whole
families vanished into rain.

7.

Settlers herded the last rattlers
on horseback, lighting fires
along Rattlesnake Ridge,

driving them down
to the river’s dark mouth
where silt bleeds
into the sea.

All night we dream of hooves
and flame, the living ground
rushing away—and wake

to the hiss of rain
on the loose shake roof.

8.

On the trail a man brags
of riding his bike
from the ridge
to the river’s edge—

a dozen snakes, he says,
lunged into his spokes

but outside of the forest
they turned to sticks.

9.

The tree that felled Henry
still stands, gnarled
by bears with deep, black eyes.

They lope away
when we approach
and watch from the shade
of pines and a gnarled oak.

This earth keeps trying
to tell us something
too quiet for how well we hear—

10.

A west-blowing wildfire
reddens the sun—

ash in windy aspen,
ash in the rake’s rusted
teeth against the barn,

bone-white summer snow
dissolving as we cup it—

until a storm, on the eighth day,
sweeps the summit clear.

11.

Past a creek that shines
like beaten tin
we find the dead meadow
where the army kept horses
in the Indian Wars.

At its center stands a rusted can
a local says that a soldier
placed there out of pity—

to water, in the dead-dry
months of summer,
the dazed, exhausted birds.

12.

You water the apples
and a stingy quince.
I harvest wood among tracks
of bobcats and bears,
scat from the cougar
we never see.

At dusk, a family of deer extends
their necks to nose
the overgrown grapes.

Night after night, there is wind
and silence, whispers
and signs of violence. And love
must be different, then—

to make a home
for this whole wrecked world
inside us.