by Travis Helms
A / BRIDGE / MENT
— for J. Edward Conrad, farmer
(second cousin) And still each day he went out in the grains.
(first cousin) During the hardest harvest seen in years.
(cousin removed) ‘I have no right to ask about your pains.’
I thought, nervous with my coffee-cup, to hear
The organist rehearsing, the question named.
You said, ‘the hardest harvest been in years?’
Mid-morning sunlight flares upon the pane:
Frames, in a fixless flux, all the scene
Outside. The mowers’ ministerings unchain
Endless cyclings of things that feed, fall lean,
Grow again to breed, and then breeding
Die to fertilize.
(first cousin) This was what we’d seen:
We come upon the engine, idling,
Somewhere in the leach-loam, moored; and then peeled
The garment, hardened, warm, tourniqueting
Off his arm.
(second cousin) When they fetched him from the field,
That day, we were like men on lidocaine:
Reckoned that lashed jeans was what the wound’d sealed.
(first cousin) Surgeries, medications, fixes thing.
(second cousin) And then this hardest harvest seen in years.
(first cousin) Alone out there among the thigh-high grain.
The soil, mixed with oil, had gritted in the gears.
(second cousin) He’d have alit from off the rusted frame.
(first cousin) Must’ve plucked a stem of grain, stared …
(cousin removed) like years:
Down both lengths of arms: the one hand tainted,
Coarse, the other gone. Watch as he presses at, around
The emptiness, the steel-hook weird against
His palm. He lies upon the opened ground,
Grinds his teeth against the stem of grain.
He feels the sweat yet wet upon his brow,
And he wishes to be finished plowing
Fields for now …
(first cousin) No one ever heard the reel-tines yield
What nameless thing had got caught up in the drive-train.
(second cousin) Or saw him reaching up beneath the whirring wheels.
(cousin removed) And so you all went out to meet him in the fields.
And the tines went on working at the grains.
I have no right to write about these things.
NOTES
SOIL AND MEMORY, ETC., AND THAT WHICH ENDS IT
Joseph Conrad / born in the Chase community on Dec.
4, 1928. / died Wednesday, May 22, 2002, as a result of a
farming accident. Conrad / baptized on April 28, 1929 /
confirmed in May 1941 at Zion Evangelical Church in
Womack.
/ married Nadine Martha Thiele on June 26, 1948 in
Zion Evangelical Church in Womack.
He spent his life farming, raising cattle, doing his
carpentry work, and joking with his family and friends. He
was always willing to lend a helping hand, and the work
was completed with a smile.
— OBIT, THE CLIFTON RECORD
WOMACK—Joseph Conrad, 72, was out cutting hay in
the field Wednesday morning when, as far as anyone can
tell, the mower/conditioner became clogged and he went
to clear it, only to get caught up in the machinery which
took his life.
He was found by his daughter, Betty Gail White, at
approximately 10 a.m., in his field on Country Road 3410,
just past Zion United Church, where he and his wife,
Nadine were members. An official on the scene said that
his heart and lungs has been pierced by the tines of the
mower.
In the early 1960s, Conrad lost his hand to a cotton
picker under similar circumstances, but he still continued
to work in the fields alone. At the scene of the accident,
one neighbor told Conrad’s wife that he will always
remember Conrad for his friendly wave and smile
whenever he was out working in the field when the farmer
drove by.
— THE CLIFTON RECORD
TRAVIS HELMS is an Episcopal priest serving the University of Texas campus, and director of LOGOS Poetry Collective: a liturgically-inflected reading series in Austin. He is author of Blowing Clover, Falling Rain: a theological commentary on the poetic canon of the American Religion’ (Pickwick / Wipf & Stock, 2020). His poems have appeared in Sons and Daughters Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, and The New Haven Review; and his articles in North American Review, Book 2.0, The Austin American-Statesman, and elsewhere.