Natalie Keener

The wind through the cornfield is teaching it how to die.

The dry leaves keen like paper wind chimes, the rattle

of a twined snake about to strike. October is not laying us gently

onto the cool stone of winter. Rains arrive in its sheets like children playing poltergeists, falling

hard in the cold that replaces marrow. My father paces the house

like a half-healed beast. His old red tractors keep capsizing in the muscled mud.

I don’t know if he prays to Mother—for the curtain of rain to be tied back,

for kernels dry enough to be worth their weight. He did not teach me this language

of his father and the one before him. I was a lantern-eyed child, forever watching, perched

on the worn cushion he set atop the auger controls when we paced back

and forth through the pale light of soybeans, corn swaying into the header’s teeth

like thin women in yellow. The combine rumbling like some great, dependable heart. Once

it caught flame in the deep night, beating back the heavens in its wanting

to be one of the stars. He’s at his best harvesting the quiet, bedded deer bolting

from the tight coils they leave like cowlicks. Trains neatly snipping the night into halves

then quarters. I cannot apply anhydrous, change hydraulics, but I do know this. This

is all I can offer to the generations before me. Of the grandchildren, only my brother and I

can convince a tractor to start. Our fathers did not pass the bowl of knowledge, only scraps.

Maybe there is comfort that we won’t worry over the rains. We will never lie awake in the blue

hours of morning over yields and profits. We are not filled with yellow eyes.

My father and I barter with our broken phrases. In three years his fields will sprout

solar panels, tractors felled by rust in the cavernous barns catching wind.

The family land finally something I can read—oak saplings, red clover, goldenrod in autumn.

For now, clouds scatter and the dust of corn husks color the air gold. He leaves the fields

open like palms, plough lines reaching to some unknown foretelling.

From Issue 48, Summer 2024 / First online publication June 16, 2024

Natalie Keener is currently chipping away at her master’s in English at the University of Toledo, where she also teaches composition. When not reading and writing, she can often be found looking for mushrooms and wildlife in her local parks. “Marrow Song” is her first published poem.