Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Bundesland Bavaria
Between Deffingen and Denzingen,
summer opened the road
forward, browning the fields and hillsides
of a country so barren
that the smallest horse grazing seemed
resentful and withdrawn,
no longer seat and throne of men
but pigeon-grey splotch
on the Blaue Reiter landscape, inured
forever to the flow
of traffic, where once it drank from rivers,
and aware of itself
as fodder for the glue factory,
as much cattle as the cattle.
Between the route the Neckar runs
and the dirty Danube,
neither the chatter of nits nor
the bleatings of birds
on the horse’s chest, spreading ears
folding over the wind
as night comes on, while stones and woods
stay no longer in their places,
begin to course, sing, and wheel,
like livestock once did,
leaving behind the parcel of the world
over the larded breast
of Southern Germany: a resource,
a wind through which
the horse rolls up to heaven
its dull and stolid eyes.
Evan Jones was born in Toronto and now lives in Manchester, United Kingdom; he recently completed a PhD at the University of Manchester. His poems have appeared in PN Review, Poetry Review, and Poetry Wales_._ His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside), was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Poetry. His second collection, Paralogues, is forthcoming from Carcanet, as is an anthology of Canadian poetry that he is co-editing. (updated 4/2010)