KRISTIN DYKSTRA
Who Disappeared Into the Hills: Extracts
The following excerpts are taken from a hybrid sequence based on the semi-rural landscape of northern Vermont, near the Canadian border. This series of poems evokes a monograph of black and white photographs, and a few images appear within them. The project explores individual and community experience. For example, Vermont’s hard winters demand routine snowplowing, one of the seasonal jobs supporting many families that appears within a poem here. Or in a very different sort of example: if you live within one hundred miles of an external border of the United States, certain laws apply within your region that differ from laws in the nation’s interior territory. Statistically speaking, most U.S. citizens live within those 100-mile zones at the borders, with varied levels of awareness about the legal constructs shaping their homes. In eras when prominent politicians demonize immigrants – one of the central features of Trump administration rhetoric, still affecting national debates – these border zones become especially symbolic.
***
A roadside progresses in the colors of its detritus. One length of old needles fallen, an ordinary autumn drop, now gone orange. One length of fallen leaves, already adding up to brown. A resistant chicory plant standing its two bright blue flowers, the only flowers surviving this segment. Less than 100 miles from the. One length of curved twigs and branches, and if a snake died now, it would blend right in. Beaver marsh accompanying several segments with tall grass, shrubs, cattails, open water. Then back: to needles, leaves, branches. See how lucid? All that is solid melts into sediment.
***
Skipping: A military craft maneuvers far above, scraping out bits of sky.
Blink at the sharpness of the autumn sun, back for an early afternoon, its skips. To walk along a dirt road in hills equals to pass from one color into another color.
Also from one frequency into another frequency. A chain of motors pierces the mind. Those who disappeared. Say it, don’t say it, try to reroute the weight of the senses, their orientation, their power, make it good, say nothing about the line. Fabricate a moving silence.
This way some realtor has passed, marking the nearest house for sale.
Someone is wrapped inside sidings of shame.
***
This time there will be no construction on the floodplain, in the center of town, too often short on water. Are you there? A social death, flickering. Maybe next time. Dignity inside a shroud, under the rough language of disbelief, things I, a personal connectivity agent, cannot connect, fuck-and-all joining in the breeze. Nonplus. To cage I cage you cage he cages she cages it cages they cage you-plural cage we cage, keeping cages to ourselves. A thousand deported mothers, would you meet them in their grief. Unyoke: suppression of thing below the glossy plane of sight. A spiral-wound firework. A wheel in the striking train of a clock. A kick that hits its target. Thoughtstops. Outcasts, retake your timeless course. It is the slated hour, and someone just walked in.
***
Baby with the figures behind the windshield, which is itself behind the plow, their time behind crunches uphill, their time behind skids downhill, bang, snow slides into units of food, other days into units of drink, but the baby, wearing a grandparent’s face.
***
Ice, and the condition of teeth, among hills. Grief for a grasped-at gone. At whose base twinkled lights. Erasures. When it appeared around the bend, throwing out snow in sheets, like spray from a motorboat. Someone tries to answer. Back to the night’s silences. Disarticulations. And laws not gone but closing, or astray on slick data. When were they ever not? Law: the craft of forming receptacles, in which to cup our force.
***
would
be good,
snow falls away
snow falls away
snow falls away
snow falls away
snow falls away
snow falls away
and sand, to hold the tires.
the people
reeling an explosion an
allotment, you, we, death, some
generality
away.
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Finalist for the National Translation Award. She organized and introduced a May 2021 dossier dedicated to Rodríguez in the digital magazine Latin American Literature Today. Previously she translated numerous poetry editions, such as books by Juan Carlos Flores, Marcelo Morales, Tina Escaja, Rodríguez, and others. Her most recent scholarly chapters examine contemporary poetry by Daniel Borzutzky (US) and Soleida Ríos (Cuba). Selections from Dykstra’s own current poetry manuscript appear in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Seedings, Clade Song, The Hopper, La Noria (with translation to Spanish by Escaja), and Acrobata (with translations to Portuguese by Floriano Martins). Her essay “Ensenada,” co-translated with Juan Manuel Tabío, appeared in Rialta in September 2021.