"Closing Inventory" from BJ Omanson's Stark County Poems, has been short-listed for "Best Poem of the Year" by The Milk House, a collective of rural writing based in Ireland.
Closing Inventory
Along the upper Spoon River, 1935
When they found him at last, he was face down
in a pool of milk out behind the barn,
an empty tin pail against his boot.
They summoned the doc, who declared him dead,
then they laid him out on the bed of the truck
and carried him back to the funeral home.
The following day they returned to the house,
where none of them had been for years,
intending, as well as they could, to put
his affairs in order, collect his receipts
and documents, and close his accounts.
Upstairs at the back, they found his bed
as neatly arranged as if he were still
a married man, although he had been
a widower now for some thirty years.
A plain wooden cross was hung on the wall
beside a window that looked out across
a quarter-acre of derelict trucks
and discarded implements choked in vines.
On his wife’s dressing table, undisturbed
apparently, since the day she had died,
a brush and mirror, a porcelain vase,
a photograph of her younger self
in a marquetry frame.
The men stood silent, taking it in,
then solemnly descended the stair
to his office, in what must have been
the parlor once— a roll-top desk,
a clamshell lamp and a telephone,
red-cornered ledgers, a spindled stack
of bills and receipts. A horsehide chair
was positioned beside a bookcase filled
with old tractor manuals, several shelves
of history, bibles, household hints,
hymnals and westerns, seed catalogues
and the odd issue of Breeder’s Gazette.
And on every hand, the desultory
detritus of an aging man’s life—
a half-empty tin of horse liniment,
a box of shells, a pouch of Old Whale,
a jar of assorted matches and nails.
One of the men bound up the ledgers,
another removed some folders from
the file cabinet. The rest of the men
moved down the hall to the kitchen where,
beside the sink, the remains of egg
and toast on a plate, a coffee-stained mug,
a folded page of the Stark County News—
an old Regulator clock on the wall
emitting a steady tick, tock,
as it had for years— a window propped up
with a butter knife and curtains that seemed
to rise and fall of their own accord.
The men filed out by twos and threes
to stand on the porch for a cigarette
before making their way across the yard
to the barn to feed and water the stock.
And then it was late and, however much
remained to be done, it was time to leave.
After the dust of their truck had drifted
across the field, the house became mute
as a mausoleum, shadowed and shut
against the world and even against
the passage of time itself,
except
in the kitchen where the window still
stood open to the evening sky,
allowing a touch of damp from the fields
and the faint, uncertain
scent of rain.
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