Giants

by Roy Bentley

(for Jack Wright)

Martin and Anna Bates, new-married, ease legs-first to the feather-bedded floor of a wagon.

Martin, seven foot six and a half inches, in Anna’s big arms, pictures crews of Irish and Welsh felling miles of two-span beech, poplar, maple, whole ancient-timbered sections of Letcher County, Kentucky.

Anna, seven foot five inches, beside him, pregnant, has asked he not mention going home. She too remembers, says the circus is food and a future for two so accustomed to stares.

He opens the twelve-pound pocket watch, wrought gold gift of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Empress of India.

In the still night on Hampshire Downs, Martin Bates, sideshow attraction, hears a mill wheel turn and take water. Rain pops for hours on the canvas, lakes of it leveed and exploding levees.

Near morning, after making love, Martin remarks how his son or daughter should know the simple ring and return of fiddle music, how joy, like a whiskey, begins at a boil in the mountains.

There are ways there and back, the trigonometries of which resolve quietly, luminously, into the ability to bear the weight of the going.

Ships in open sea, in approaching storm, intuit angels of ice and wind and spoiling wave, courses put across at precisely the moment when, what is summonable, is outline and foreign.

Mid-ocean, cupped hands of companionable light resist charting. The trusted sextant sights and re-sights,being all the equipment of habit that works.

And what of firm soil, after undulating months at sea, landed horizon-line so finite and abruptly vertical as to make of the slow extendings of continents, something dreamed?

The world ashore censed with high lapping, bay breezes that track and sweep us, spilling news of essential things: cramped trains of immigrant and native, crossing insular slopes, level miles of trestled valley.

In one lighted train-car, a man takes the gloved hands of a large woman, uncovers and kisses them, equally.

In a log house by the thawing north fork of the Kentucky River, Anna Bates has just pushed out the largest live birth in recorded history.

Twenty-three pounds eleven ounces.

Bruised, it breathes and follows Martin’s watch.

When it dies near evening, unnamed, Anna will kiss and wrap a brooding likeness, famous body purchased by wire by a health museum in Cleveland, Ohio; where, in a white room, behind glass, suspended,

it is the shadowed face of Elkhorn Creek, Pound Gap, the Cumberlands.

Look at me, it says.

For one day, in one high-ceilinged room, I was all the fire.

This poem was first published by The Journal (David Citino, Editor) and then published in Any One Man, Roy Bentley, Bottom Dog Books.Copyright © 1992, 2016 by Roy Bentley. All rights reserved.

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