Читать книгу The Lease - Mathew Henderson - Страница 5

You sleep on stacked mattresses and mice run

the floor, biting at toes; you wake, set traps

and stack the mattresses higher still.

This is old Sask summer: flax and mustard

paint the horizon the bright yellow colour of sun

you find in children’s pictures, and always

the sky is just another dead prairie above you.

Everything you remember lives inside

the chicken-farm homestead

with its back-broken frame and that reek

of old water sitting still. At night the house breathes

with open windows, swells at the seams.

At sunrise, it exhales a dust so fine

you think of bull hearts, dried and ground.

When it’s gutted of furniture, you find imprints

in the carpet: four beds, two dressers, a shelf.

And from those years when no one kept it,

from before the oil and the oilmen came, the mark

where the deer walked in, lay down and died.