Peter Richardson is the author of four books of poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry (Chicago), The Sonora Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and Prism International among other journals. His third collection, Sympathy for the Couriers, won Quebec’s A.M. Klein Award in 2007. Bit Parts for Fools (Goose Lane Editions, 2013) is his most recent book. He lives in Montreal (Tiohtia:ke).
“To say I was moved by first seeing the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, and then reading the book would be an understatement. I was swept off my feet by it. The enclosed poem is a tinkering with and a reimagining of three scenes from the novel.
“McCarthy’s account of a father and son attempting to survive in the first years following a nuclear holocaust defies easy imitation. In any case, I was not out to imitate anything. What I did want was to convey a sense of the devastated landscape and the constant tension present for a widower and his nine-year-old son traversing a pitiless geography.”
1. On This Ashen Floodplain
where nothing will grow
but the stacked remains
of ambushed passersby,
a bearded man uncorks
his jug and kneels
to take what’s potable
under floating ash
near the settlement
where he lost his folks
to a passing blood horde
in scarecrow duds.
The elders couldn’t bolt
fast enough to outrun
the front reapers—men
whose job is to stun
and bring to their knees
those grown too weak
to stand and parry a blow.
The man recorks his jug
while his young son
drops down beside him,
their faces watchful
of what the wind disgorges
beyond the skeletal
bird-less cedars: a troop
slamming the butts
of homemade halberds
into the pocked roadway,
call and response their mode
of ghosting across the flatlands.
2. Winter Trail
Their mode of ghosting across the flatlands is to stop
when the cadence caller pumps his fist. Ten pullers
chained to a wagon slump and cough in pairs.
Guards lean on pikes and watch their boss for clues.
“Is something up? Did he just see a two-legged sheep?
But how can such a braised hillside offer us diddly?”
Whenever there’s reason to think their crew might
drain a gourd or fill one with a slug of vermilion,
bad weather blows in to move them further west.
Whatever movement the boss thought he saw,
it’s vanished behind a fast-arriving snow squall.
Fuck this wind, he shouts. Get your butts in gear.
The burlap-covered wagon clanks onward. A gray blur
signals its progress over the charred plain. Men bark
what the drover chants—a song about marrow soup.
Meanwhile, up that hillside, flattened in a ditch, a boy
can’t get to his feet. His scarecrow dad hoicks him up,
saying they must scram and not wait for another savvier
horde to lumber by. “We’re lucky it’s dusk,ˮ he rasps
as they slap snow off the coats their bodies float in—
a father and son in scavenged rag-wrapped lace ups.
3. Coastal Break
A father and son in scavenged rag-wrapped lace ups
stagger down the side of a dune.
Have they failed to sniff out a buried root cellar
and now this sideways slew
with a grocery cart to the level tidal sands below
remains their best option?
Watch them open a few cans of pears and feast
under a mile-thick layer
of cloud while the man pivots to cough blood.
This is where he will offer useful travelling tips
and a pinchpenny’s advice
regarding the pistol with its one remaining slug.
Ragged flumes of breath
will pass between them as the father raises
his voice to hearten the boy:
You’ll be lucky, son. You’ll see. In a month
the mile-high fallout will part
to warm this Gulf of Mexico beach
and its cache of hawksbill turtle eggs in sand.
