By Rachel Rinehart

Abandoned barns and houses are a common feature of farm country in Ohio. It’s not unusual to see them far back off the highway—two-story clapboard colonials with doors missing or ajar, an oak tree growing out of a roofless silo or vine-choked milkhouse. These places are, as Mary Oliver presents them in her poem “The River Styx, Ohio,” extinct portals to the underworld, places where a connection has been severed, where old ways of knowing and suffering are buried.

Lost and searching for a crossroads, the speaker in the poem, her mother, and her grandmother find themselves in River Styx, a town eerie, real, and vacant. “We left the car and wandered through a field,” Oliver writes. “Three ladies pausing in an indifferent space.” The landscape cedes nothing beyond detritus and family graves. There is no one left to interpret them for us, to tell the story of the “hard lesson” learned “without much fanfare or delay.” Indeed, “Farms to both sides shook, bankrupt, in the wind.” Here, the women have neither Sybil nor Virgil to guide them as they approach the Styx. Instead, they have blundered upon it, the mother, navigating in the passenger seat “bifocaled, squinting” at maps.

In Fagles’ translation of the Aeneid, Virgil describes Charon as he hauls his souls across the silty Styx:

. . . But all on his own

he punts his craft with a pole and hoists sail

as he ferries the dead souls in his rust-red skiff.

He’s on in years, but a god’s old age is hale and green.

As Oliver tells it in her poem, the ferryman is nowhere to be found: “There was a graveyard, but we saw no people.” Gone, too, the farmer, gone the throng of souls on this strange, midwestern Stygian shore. One cannot cross the river into the past. Left behind, on this shore, we see not a wrecked skiff but, perhaps, a rust-red harvester, or a plough tangled in wild raspberry brambles, but no one is there to tell us what such things signify.

“We hope for magic; mystery endures,” says the speaker in Oliver’s poem. “We look for freedom, but the measure’s set.” The missing farmer, an erstwhile Charon riding his furrows edge to edge. Whither and how he has gone is a mystery, but no magic can resurrect him. No revivifying song can put breath back in the farmer’s lungs, nor diesel back in the blown tank of the rusted tractor. All that’s possible is bleak surmise.

“Dim with arthritis, time, the muddied seasons” the grandmother counts cows in the backseat; out of a senile blur emerges the nervous habit of one accustomed to loss. For the women in the poem, arthritis, too, becomes both the harbinger of death and the analogue of corroding farm equipment, rigid and immovable with age. Oliver closes the poem by invoking the mother’s “tightening fingers” and the “first stab of pain” in the speaker’s knuckles, as they re-embark, disoriented, on their journey home.

I grew up on such a defunct Ohio farm, some 120 miles southwest of River Styx. My parents built a new house where, years before I was born, my great grandfather’s house began to fall in. Warned to watch for holes under the mil- dewy straw in the haymow, we treated the old barnyard as a playground of sorts, full of kittens and barn swallows, cloudy glass jugs and antique tools. Amid the scattered and sundry galvanized pails and dry-rotted burlap, the skeins and skeins of bailing twine, I developed an obsession with arrangement. Who leaned the broken wooden yoke against the gate for the last time? What were the draft horses named?

The history of the place was for me, like the women in Oliver’s poem, impene- trable. My great grandfather was someone I knew only secondhand: a man who sometimes drank Old Grand-Dad bourbon and used a dented Folgers can for a spittoon. A man who napped corpse-like with his arms crossed over his chest. My great grandmother even my mother never knew.

Often, during the early days of October, when rain was scarce and a dry wind buffeted the browning corn, the boundary line of the old front porch appeared in the front yard. On the other side of it now, we can only surmise, knowing that when stories of our past decay we endure a death-in-life kind of existence, bereft of antecedent and uncaring toward the future. We must remember what Aeneas knew, that there could be no Rome without the old city of Troy, that he could not build a future without knowing the past buried with his father in the underworld.

So, surmise we must: Sunday mornings, too ill for worship, my great grandmother shifts heavily in her ladderback rocker, the faulty family heart gutter- ing in her chest. It is the year before her death and the fallen maple leaves are “ruffling like an ugly lace” on one side of the barnyard. On the other, a few head of Charolais chuff and snort at the grass. Under her faded house dress, her legs take on water.

About a mile down the road in the church at the crossroads, my great grandfather stiffens in the pew, his vision hazy with the first glaucomatous haloes. He’s on in years, and he’s no god. For him, it will be another thirty-odd years, but something will go wrong. The future is at once uncertain and inevitable. His measure is set. But the mystery, as Oliver writes, still endures.

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Rachel Rinehart’s poetry collection The Church in the Plains was selected by Peter Everwine as the winner of the 2016 Philip Levine Poetry Prize and was published by Anhinga Press in January 2018. She lives in Grayson, KY, with her husband and daughters.