Poetry by Denton Loving
Denton Loving’s third collection of poems is Feller, published by Mercer University Press. He is a co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Ecotone.
Life Is Boring
When I was young, my father could not bear for me to say I was bored. The word was outlawed. Verboten. I can find you plenty to do, he’d say, meaning mowing grass, cleaning fencerows, weeding the garden, mucking the barn. My father kept too busy for boredom to ever touch him. He nailed down the loose tin on the barn roof, stretched new barbed wire to patch old fences, stacked hay in the barn in summer, fed hay to the cattle in winter. He tilled and hoed long rows of beans, corn, and tomatoes. He picked apples, peaches, and cherries from the orchard, giving most of it away. The work I thought he loved never held the same allure for me. How his eyes could bore into me with disappointment. When I said I was bored, I meant I didn’t know what to do with myself. In the first years of my life, we lived in neighborhoods, our home a constant barrage of kids. Then we moved to an isolated hill farm where there were no playmates. I had no siblings. When I said bored, I meant lonely. I couldn’t see that he was lonely too. Lonely for dead parents, for friends who wander away and never return, for time and evaporated youth. Now that I’m older than he was when he forbade me to speak that word, I am busier than ever. I mow, prune, plant, and weed. I walk my father’s old fencelines clipping wild rose and blackberry briars. I pick up stray rocks in the fields. The more I do, the more it all feels dull and burdensome. I’m just bored, I want to say, but the word rusts in my mouth.
I’d like to honor the women of my youth:
the church matrons and garden club ladies
with their pancake makeup and beauty-shop hair,
their blouses with shoulder pads and big bows,
their broad-rimmed hats fit for Derby. Women
who drove church vans through muddy, backwood
hollers as easily as they dined with Presidents.
Women who waved me over in restaurants
to rope me into Saturday morning litter pickups
on the sides of highways, who guilted me
to Arbor Day ceremonies, Friday night supper clubs,
sunrise Easter breakfasts and concerts in the park.
Once more, I’d like to walk through the long-gone
Shoney’s to find these women plotting their campaign
against some high-ranked man—some preacher
or mayor or captain of industry—someone to sway
with the gravity of their concerns. If I could do it over,
I’d volunteer to bring the country ham for the church’s
fifth Sunday dinner, extra bags for the roadside trash.
I’d snap a roll of photos to send to the newspaper
so the world could see their symbolic Japanese cherry—
a gift from some sister city—and these women
who celebrated ceremony, standing in a semi-circle
with their arsenal of shovels spraypainted gold.
Winter Solstice
My mother cries when she finds a forgotten box
of her great aunt’s photos. Neither of us knows
what to do with these faces we don’t recognize,
young more than a century ago. Even their names
are lost to us, the backs of the photos mostly blank,
only a city or town stamped on a few: Camp Hill,
Newport, Pallas, Sunbury, Liverpool. On one,
the address of the photographer, John F. Fasnacht,
814 Market Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
not far from where my cousin Jennifer still lives,
blocks from the Susquehanna, which has flowed
through my family for at least nine generations.
Last summer, my cousin and I walked her mastiff
along the riverbanks. I’ve driven down Market
Street a dozen times in my life. I could drive you
there now though to what purpose I couldn’t say.
My mother is right. These pictures are unbearable,
the way they’ve captured brief moments in a trick
of chemicals and light to outlast the people in them.
And no one wants them now—we have our own
photos full of ghosts. We should record their names
on the backs. But who can bear to conjure the dead
or dwell on how they once brought us so much joy.