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Playing in the Pastoral Dream
My neighbor spent the summer destroying
his yard. Lopping the tops of his trees,
and razing the ground until it was no more
than dirt, the roots of vines ascending
like wire. I was on the sidewalk
watching my kids ride bikes when his wife
came onto their porch in a bathrobe.
Her head behind the screen was pale and bald
from what could only be chemo.
My body seized at the sight of her,
and I thought of my sister last winter
in her wig. It’s no use, I wanted
to tell him. There’s no construction,
no revision that will stop this.
In the street it was dusk: I knew about death
and I didn’t. It hardly mattered.
The red brush of a cardinal darted
across my yard in the evening’s odd coolness,
moving to her nest in the hedgerow.
Sycamores lining the street shed bark
like snakes in wide strokes, leaving their trunks
a pale green. Inside my pastoral dream,
the white noise of cicadas rises
around my son playing in the grass.
The street lies awash in golden light
like that of endless spring. And my daughter,
at the end of the block, she’s a deer
wandering the trees, she’s in and out of sight.
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Clare Banks is the author of Notes on Endings, forthcoming from Terrapin Books, and associate editor for Smartish Pace. A recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Iron Horse, Boulevard, Poet Lore, and Mississippi Review, among others. She was nominated for the Best New Poets 2023 anthology by Mississippi Review, was a 2023 finalist in Radar Poetry's Coniston Prize and a 2024 finalist in Iron Horse Literary Review's National Poetry Month Prize. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City where she co-hosts The HOT L Poets Series.
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Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889.