Landmark

Christopher Salerno

First published in Salt Hill 27 (2011).

Field and field and well and field. As if houses weren’t around anymore.
Someone said they remembered an electric fence.
I remember the horses licking us before we got truly lost.
My grandfather, my real father, me. We found a single hoof protruding
from the creek-bed. I piled up pinecones. I built around that a house
of postcards and covered that with a tubesock.

We walked among the unturned
stones near the creek, balancing militarily our reflections.
A dense web of gnats hung like a radio wave above the water.
But no houses crowded our eyes.
There was barely anything at all, maybe a prairie full of horsehair.
It was difficult to keep from laughing. There was no breaking out of nature.

Christopher Salerno’s books of poems include Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017), ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), Minimum Heroic, winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Series Award (2010), and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey.