POETRY May 2, 2025

Slag Dust and Dead Leaves 

After Marsh Hawk (1971) by Andrew Wyeth

Leave it to a beautiful morning to reveal all

my hidden disappointments. The frayed black oak,

its tangled boughs, peeks from behind

the white selvage of the mill’s curling clapboards

like a lost and irretrievable person

who departed before I said anything meaningful

or final. I am often haunted

by the most ridiculous things—the blue hay wagons

and buckboards, their splintered wood and empty beds.

The smell of slag dust and dead leaves

in the burn barrel. I had a good life,

but it was so much work to get that prayer answered.

Late Autumn and the young cold lurks across the field,

its short breath desiccating the acres of bluegrass,

turning them the color of a laceration.

All my kinkeepers are gone, and I did not intend to be

the only one left. I did not want to watch

all of our history and labor lose its utility. Distracted

by the moss and mold drying out

on the stable’s pitched roof, I almost miss the bird 

perched far off in the flood plain, isolated

atop a stump, waiting for winter,

holding the whole valley in its grain-sized eye.

John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Pleiades, and Quarterly West. John is the managing editor of RHINO.