Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest

By B. H. Fairchild b. 1942

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat

of his father’s Ford and the mysterium

of time, holds time in memory with words,

night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south

of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks

the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences

and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make

the child think of time in its passing, of death.

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps

of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe

up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this

road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest

float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.

Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-

swags running the moon under, and starlight

rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,

the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging

a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind

of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,

locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.

The great horse people, his father, these sounds,

these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car

moves across the moving earth: world, this world.

B. H. Fairchild, “Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest” from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. Copyright © 2003 by B. H. Fairchild. Reprinted with the permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2003)

Biography

B.H. Fairchild was born in 1942 in Houston, Texas, and grew up in small towns in Texas and Kansas. The son of a lathe operator, he attended the University of Kansas and the University of Tulsa. His poetry explores the empty landscapes of the region of his birth, and the lives of its working-class residents, including his own family and friends. Frequently described as a poet of the “sacred,” Fairchild’s work has gained renown . . .

Continue reading this biography