I spoke to myself in the rain barrel. My face was blue where oil swam. Barrels are like bodies with poisons coming to the surface of lives.
Under a six-foot two-by-eight that had fallen an October earlier, night crawlers, earthworms and centipedes left their maps. In corners of a nest fallen from lesser hands of maples, a spittle white as old cheese, gathered strength, new angles. Some bird had worn itself away, a summer heaved overboard, quick candle flicker in the limbs. You wonder how “it” comes back.
In the odd thousand days a crow lives, in this time span, he once must come under my window scavenging more time; territorial claw marks mark the thefts. In a chunk of wall, a piece of wall vibrates its hyperthyroid eyes. As winter heaves self toward us, a frog takes one last glance. The sun gets buried in his eyes at the moment a last leaf moves, grass throws one final greeting, and I watch the year’s embers cool down at the base of a wall. The whole arena of the backyard turns gray and neutral and numb as I draw a ruler across bare limbs.
All this talk, all these signs dictate to my skin, hunch my back, make my hair grow longer, quicker, send serious thoughts to spare gaps, bring into play the calculators we wear on our nerve ends, operate faithfully every weather change, August darting towards October. A maple pulls up its skirts to walk a four-month walk in snow, the pine shrugs its shoulders under gray skies, the frog and I assume the January bite.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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