Nick Lantz: “Starvation Ranch”

Starvation Ranch

Frank Hite, my  	    mother’s    
                                    father’s    
                                    mother’s    
                                    father, 
named his farm 	   Starvation Ranch,
     					                       and one July,   
                        I balanced    
                                                               high on a ladder 
to repaint those white letters  
                        on the same 	  red barn
where they’ve been for a hundred years.

But that summer 	     is a sketch, a note
written in the margin          	  of a book I gave 
away. I shot rabbits      and learned
to drive and listened 
to the same  		     Lou Reed tape on loop
in the upper bedroom  	          of my family’s farmhouse. 

In a closet I found  
                        my grandmother’s high school yearbook
in which she had crossed out  	     the name 
           of each classmate
who had died. 

I learned there are three kinds
of garbage— 
             the kind that goes in the compost heap  
                         to feed the garden that grows the peppers and the corn, 
             the kind that goes in the ditch   
                                     to feed the coyotes who howl at night, 
             the kind that goes in an old oil drum    
                                                  to burn

I learned to love                    the indentation  
            my grandmother’s pencil
left in the paper  		         over a name,  
                        like the tally marks
I carved into a tree for each rabbit I shot.

I learned that a stone arrowhead,  	     taken
from a newly plowed field 	  that has held it
for hundreds of years  	          is still  	           sharp enough 
            to cut my palm. 

I learned to love the hiss  		       of silence 
            on the tape 		         after a song 
ended, the sound 	    of time
like the susurrus of insects  		     at dusk, like a broom
whisking clean
the floor of some  		          upper room. 

I learned how to walk  
the perimeter of the house and feel  		  in the grass
the edges 	 of the old foundation, 
            a version  		        of house that burned, 
that  	        disappeared, that was  	    rewritten,
and I learned how to walk  	           farther out
into the pastures, to spot 	 the earthen mounds
left behind by people   		             who remain only
in names 	of rivers and country roads.

That was one  	   summer.  	    Decades
later, I learned that the barn I painted was not
even the original,  	     which had been replaced,  
            board by beam,
years before.

And I learned that barns are red 
because red paint
is cheap because iron
is abundant 
because dying stars 
sighed iron atoms 
into space
and those atoms 
gathered here
on earth, became 
the earth,
became blood 
and arrowheads
and steel girders 
holding up towers 
and the red paint of barns.