RJ: "The Dumka" by B.H. Fairchild

The Dumka

His parents would sit alone together
on the blue divan in the small living room
listening to Dvorak's piano quintet.
They would sit there in their old age,
side by side, quite still, backs rigid, hands
in their laps, and look straight ahead
at the yellow light of the phonograph
that seemed as distant as a lamplit
window seen across the plains late at night.
They would sit quietly as something dense

and radiant swirled around them, something
like the dust storms of the thirties that began
by smearing the sky green with doom
but afterwards drenched the air with an amber
glow and then vanished, leaving profiles
of children on pillows and a pale gauze
over mantles and table tops. But it was
the memory of dust that encircled them now
and made them smile faintly and raise
or bow their heads as they spoke about

the farm in twilight with piano music
spiraling out across red roads and fields
of maize, bread lines in the city, women
and men lining main street like mannequins,
and then the war, the white frame rent house,
and the homecoming, the homecoming,
the homecoming, and afterwards, green lawns
and a new piano with its mahogany gleam
like pond ice at dawn, and now alone
in the house in the vanishing neighborhood,

the slow mornings of coffee and newspapers
and evenings of music and scattered bits
of talk like leaves suddenly fallen before
one notices the new season. And they would sit
there alone and soon he would reach across
and lift her hand as if it were the last unbroken
leaf and he would hold her hand in his hand
for a long time and they would look far off
into the music of their lives as they sat alone
together in the room in the house in Kansas.

~ B.H. Fairchild


*

Huh. Hmm. The first stanza's so... so... dull. Ten lines and one real image? I like my poetry to be made of thicker stuff. I forgive this poem that initial slackness, however, in that the subject matter requests and makes good upon that quiet outset: it is the peace from which the poem spirals out, says its peace about the sobriety nostalgia and gratitude can (should?) impose, and eventually returns to. The poem begins in Kansas, in other words, and returns to Kansas by stanza four: "together in the room in the house in Kansas", as an ending, is way more powerful than the words themselves have any right to be. This is what's meant when we say a line or an ending must be earned: "the sky green with doom" and "the homecoming, the homecoming, / the homecoming" transfigure the ending line into more than the sum of its parts. It's a final line rife with the weight of lived experience.