For the last year I’ve walked the same neighborhood route in Pratt, documenting the changes to the geography. There are still so many homes half-standing, half-unmade.

This evening there was a celebration on the corner of Dugan and Hibernian. So many people out, dancing to music and applauding the politicians and their promises about the rebuilding to come. Always it seems to me the future is the good thing that is to come for us all. And we all hope it is true, what they have said, that it will happen.

The young ants have chosen to leave their colonies this afternoon. They keep landing on my orange shirt as if they have found their mate, as if they have found a vertical earth to detach their silken wings upon and dig through the fabric, make a chambered home.

I am clearing the fence line with chainsaw, clippers, and sling, where the rusted strands of barbed wire have been broken by the growing trees. So far, I have worked through thickets of poison ivy, briar, and Virginia creeper, made a path through honey suckle, wild cherries, scrub oak, and pine. Without the path, we cannot pull new strands. And without the strands, my father’s cows will cross from the field into the road, where at night they’ll be found by drunken car drivers zooming, not looking where they are slipping to.

Our two geese have circled the pond honking. They got here for spring a few weeks ago. And the irrigation dragons have sat quietly in the field on black wheels, hoping for rain. So far there have been flares of thunder. When the cold air hits, you can taste the rain in your sweat lift. It is enough to make you want to cross into the rye field for the lightning coming, the space around you opening even more.

*

“Some day we will try / To do as many things as are possible / And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful / Of them, but this will not have anything / To do with what is promised today, our / Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear / On the horizon” – John Ashbery

Like that story about the stalk and Jack, you and I could take any vine, rung by leafy rung, to a heaven-land of honey and one milking cow heavier than all the cumulus fluff in the world we just passed through.  Except, instead of god, a hungry giant awaits, singing for tired climbers who’ve managed the trip so far.

But these blackberry stalks aren’t strong enough to climb onto, which isn’t to say they are not mighty.  They are the memory of blackberries at the field’s edge of a farmhouse in New England where I once lived; they mark the deep thorn creases in the moon’s splotched face when it shows.

Inside my father’s home, the ivy has spread above the ceiling joists, become a wire mesh marking the beginning when my father put the roof in place.  And holding up the floor joists of the shack on my uncle’s land, who years ago departed, whose son wants the building pushed down, the wisteria is now the root bed, the foundation.

My son, my daughter, and I took old boards from that ceiling in December.  In the rooms, wet rye seed and fertilizer bags, a ripped up sofa, what was left by people now gone.  The lightered wood will be the floor in a cabin we are building.  And when the boards swung down, hundred year dust filled the empty windows where the wisteria had twisted knuckles into the frame.  Then the wind shook the beams where squirrels from a different winter had left pecans and a nest of straw for us to find.

I stood on the ladder, rocking, wondering what would happen if the vines were cut: would the house fall away?  the yard?  the field beyond it? would the soil float up to meet the clouds until the quiet bee houses at the edge of the woods disappeared?  Everything going somewhere, except for us transfixed by shapes still breathing in the frame.

Maybe the twenty percent chance the weatherman has been preaching will be our luck this time, the drought here will finally give way.  The lightning and wind try to convince us, and I tell him and my son Dylan we need to get the first corner post in the ground before the rain. 

My son lifts the post hole digger handles, punches the ground—he’s the young back—while my father and I hobble to the truck for gloves like barbed wire is coiled around our legs.  We joke about being old men.  When he first bought this land, my father dug all the holes, put up all the fences himself.  Fifty some years since he did that, before I was even born.

The ground is a dry powder that keeps slipping through the jaws of the post hole diggers.  My father heads to the house for gallon jugs of water, his alchemy for turning dust to mud so it’ll stick in-between the blades and we can dig this hole.  The sky grumbles.  The rain hasn’t arrived, and if this digging is going to happen, we need alchemy.

Then Dylan hits a root of the closest pine.  He can’t cut through it, not strong enough yet, and I spear the earth over and over until chunks of root tear free and the smell of rosin lifts with the dust and he can go on working. 

I tell him to throw the post hole diggers into the ground like a javelin, not that I’ve ever thrown one.  Let go of the handles at the last moment.  Then my father returns and adds half-jug of the water.  Now try it, he says.  The dirt sticks like it should when my son brings up the closed blades.  So many things to tell him.  When he’s tired, I take over, and my chest hurts down the center where the force of throwing the post hole diggers has shaken up the bone and muscle. 

Don’t have a stroke, my father says. 

I’m too young, I tell him and don’t tell him about the pain.

When I’m tired, Dylan takes over again and we are down to the handles now, three feet deep.  We need to go one foot more.  My father takes over for awhile, but neither my son nor I want him working for long.  He’s put in his time across these years.  And the storm did miss us like he said—we got a few drops—and the lightning is striking west over Seville now. 

Here, the darkness seems to creep up from the grass, and I throw the post hole diggers into the ground like a javelin.  Sparks flash where the metal blades scrape against the iron in the clay, the sides of rocks.  It’s as if we’ve dug up the universe, where stars are made and die quickly.  Or maybe we’ve uncovered where falling stars are buried, having sliced into the earth and cooled.  If the sparks and dust catch, a fire will spread through the pine roots, feeding off the rosin, until the whole earth becomes the sun burning again. 

Deep enough, my father says and we lift the corner post, set it, pack the mud and dust with the handles.  We can pull the first wire tomorrow.

Soon we’ll be driving to Cordele for supper, and later I’ll come back out, walk the road by the field, after midnight, the stars underneath me, the ones above marking the space between us.

I should go inside, but across the bay I see where rain has covered one hill of homes and high-rises stacked and squeezed together.  Every space is glassed concrete and pavement, nature manicured down to sand and ocean, what is valued here.

I’m waiting for the sheet of rain to cross the bay to us, for the first drops to pop on the water.  I’m waiting for that sound to reach me, what I’ve always known, rain coming across fields or through pine needles, bringing wet sky, suddenly the cool taste of the earth settling in your throat.

But on a day like this with whole sheets of gray clouds torn away from white clouds, sinking down with rain, with heaven this close, it feels as if the horizon has moved, as if the road is ascending, as if every breath elevates, gravity no longer tangible and easy to let go of.

At the corner, a pear tree rooted into the sidewalk forks at the sky.  Tiny shoots have sprouted green with green leaves along the trunk and what remains of the branches just like the swamp pines in South Georgia whose needles poke out wherever lightning flashes into the bark.  And across the street, more forked pears.  At the base of them, bricks, glass, a flattened school-crossing sign and strips of plywood.  But along the trunks, green branches regenerating.

A train howls—I can’t see it; it’s down in South Pratt—and cars, so many cars coming and going on this highway, hurrying through.  They no longer slow to look at the torn up earth and buildings.  After awhile even devastation becomes familiar. 

It’s hard to explain why you can breathe easier here with so much rebuilding still to be done, but just like the shock we all felt in April when the tornadoes cut through these neighborhoods in Alabama, a calmness has unexpectedly set in.  You feel it without realizing it.  But even in the calmness, there’s a disconnect. 

An old spotted dog walks up the street, looks at me, turns away. A huge steel plate sits over a hole in the road and the cars keep hitting it.  Across the street, young kids walking, singing, four girls going to meet four boys.

The power lines are up.  They were one of the first things.  And stoplights working.  On Dugan the Qwik mart has reopened.  “Just last week,” I’m told inside.  It’s the only store open in North Pratt.  Outside, men sit at the door, ask for money, and car after car stops here. 

Wire, glass, wood—all of it has been removed from the roads as if nothing happened, pushed into empty lots or carried off on dump trucks.  White signs for land clearings and demolition are everywhere. One lot on Hibernian has been leveled, the fresh turned dirt ready for a new house, the north corner marked with a pair of pine stumps.  But all around this empty space, fallen homes and apartments waiting, the smell of the sewer and rotting wood and mattresses.

If you keep walking to Sheridan Road, you’ll find a small ravine of pines and bays sheared off, full of the machinery and paper of nearby homes.  Someone’s sweater swings on a branch and inside that grove, birds calling back and forth to one another, cicadas cranking up like back-firing mufflers.  In the dead branches, red birds, swallows.  They flit across the sky, the shape of their flight harder and harder to make out. 

One bureau mirror in a second floor apartment keeps caching the last light of the sun, reflecting it as a blue-silver past the missing wall.  And I wonder who was at that mirror before the tornado came, what they found in their reflection.  Did they believe things would be all right?  Did they tell themselves, just go to sleep?  Where are they now?

All the car lights have come on, darkness blurring the corner wood of the houses, free hot showers available at the fire station, and blue tarps pocking the roofs.  And on one curb, white bags of trash like the ones we’ve taken out on summer evenings before pickup.  Only no house behind it, just the foundation, the stairs where you could walk up and enter the blue-black night.