After Long Division

by David Axelrod
 

I. At the Wellhead
 

There was going to be a world
of increase and jubilee,
prolific shade, afternoons
full of exponential ease
beside a stream and trout
skittering away like faces
erased from the final
measures of a dream.
We all waited for that,
even the dead,
who puzzled over sigils
scored into stones
someone, forgotten now,
raised at a crossroads
 

long ago. There was going to be
justice, the unity of one
and the infinity of June,
irrigation wheels in grain fields
singing work songs,
their casual ch-ch-ch,
and a silver mist
risen from the steadfast
darkness inside Earth
would drench the skift
of emergent wheat
and us, too,
the partisans of these
manifold and bumper yields.
 

II. Kraft oder Macht?
 

Ours, it turns out,
was neither the world
as will, nor reverie—
 

engines full throttle,
instinct the piston,
strife the fuel. Come
 

seizure of power,
our fierce bungling
warrants this
 

middle world
shifting toward riot
or false accord, moral zeros
 

shoved off the right-hand margin,
our lives just
a wire-thin spume
 

tides leave on littered beaches—
fractional remainders,
the grit of long division.
 

III.The Innermost Chamber of My Home Is Yours
 

Until now, I hadn’t looked up all day—
 

it’s already late-October
and this last month of the campaign
the rains returned,
 

the Earth soft underfoot,
lawns in town, fescue, wildrye
and bunchgrass in the foothills,
winter wheat in the valley,
 

all bled together into a green film.
 

And for no reason at all
I glanced up the slopes
of Glass Hill, where forests
burned forty years ago
 

and caught a glimpse of it—
a former world
where a young aspen grove
 

yields back all of summer’s light into air.

---

David Axelrod’s second collection of nonfiction, The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence was published by Oregon State University Press in the spring of 2019. Axelrod wrote the introduction, “My Interests Are People,” for About People: Photographs by Gert Berliner, which appeared in the summer of 2018 from Arts End Books. His eighth collection of poems, The Open Hand, appeared in 2017 from Lost Horse Press. Axelrod directs the low residency MFA and Wilderness, Ecology, and Community program at Eastern Oregon University. In addition, he edits basalt: a journal of fine & literary arts, and serves on the editorial board of Lynx House Press.