Packed full of life's pictures and memories.

Farm Auction 

by Amy Fleury 

Contrails scrawl the sky under which

sawhorse-and-lumber tables offer up

the hoard and store of fifty years.

Neighbors have come to scour house

and barn and implement shed.

Yes, we’ve come to haul it all away-

their nests of pillows and quilts

and feather ticks, the glazed plates

and bread crocks, a washtub rimed

with bluing, the saltcellar and gravy boat,

her cross-stitch sampler and figurines,

canning jars, seals, lids. And spools

of baling wire, seed drills, spades,

coffee cans of bolts and bent nails,

a burlap-wrapped schnapps bottle

he kept back of the barn’s fuse box and all

his spare fuses. An aerial photo of their farm.

And even the rusted harrow in the ditch.

The auctioneer works to disperse

all their worldly goods, singing hey

somebody give me twenty now, twenty

as his wife hands over odd boxes

of cribbage boards and crucifixes

to the ladies fanning themselves

with sale bills by the tilting lilacs.

From the porch the 4-H club sells

plates of peach pie and waxy cups of pop.

Inside, the smell of silage still clings

to his chambray shirt hung

on the backdoor peg after choring.

How, in stocking feet, he loved to step

on the warm place where the dog had lain,

where dilapidated hips collapsed her

in a sleeping, yellow heap.

Now all is echo where once they sat

together with the ledger, adding columns

of crop yields and prices per bushel,

or thumbing rosaries like they shelled peas-

dutiful, dutiful to the ceaseless seasons,

to their tillage and cattle and kin.

Through the window screen comes little gusts

and the sound of the gavel coming down.