Stephen Behrendt is a native of northern Wisconsin, transplanted to Nebraska some forty years ago and now the George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, where his special interests are in the literature, art and culture of the “long” Romantic period. His poetry has been widely published and includes four book-length collections, most recently “Refractions” (2014).
ABANDONED FARMHOUSE
C McPherson County
It must have been white, once, and straight,
before the paint began to blister and peel,
the split-wood slat shingles to curl and lift
and shear off on the black spring gusts.
Now these blind windows, shattered and shutterless,
face the hopeless days on fields gone fallow,
red cedar and mullein and bull thistle
reclaiming from plow and harrow what had been theirs.
Old Kaltmann brought her here from Bremen,
Hannelore, who spoke no English, but baked each day
in her black iron stove great humpback loaves
redolent of caraway from her lacquered spice chest
and bore seven sons, but no daughter to teach to bake,
to plant and sew and put up beans and peaches.
The boys died off, year by year, of fevers and mischance,
and sleep in the little Lutheran churchyard,
their untended graves overgrown with sedge and bindweed,
their lives gone missing in the lanky prairie grasses,
lost with the sexton=s records when the church burned.
Wasting like her thinning, fading calico dresses,
their mother perished by subtle measurings,
spirit scooped away in spoonfuls of sorrow, none to tell,
to sew with in blessed silent company, withering
amid the endless sweeping wind that emptied the soil.
The one who brought her buried her
here on the homestead, on this barren hill
where the wind sweeps raw her grave,
old Kaltmann buried now behind the county asylum,
its own roof fallen in, abandoned
like the blank-eyed souls that withered there
on undulating sandy plains of forgetfulness
that rolled and roiled like thunderheads massing,
this slouching farmhouse sloughing fragments still
across the rootless soil that shifts and streams
on the pitiless prairie wind.
