The Flowers
There are petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and petals and then petals and okay, I promised, I’ll leave them at her grave. She drowned, you know.
Rainy Season
It’s a mixed bag, when it rains. Sometimes, it’s nice, I guess, when you can wake up in the morning and see the mist settling on the ground, and everyone is just a shadow in a collective dream. When the camellias bloom. Other times, it is less so. My clothes are wet. I’m going to have to buy a new coat now.
Love Is Gray
Sometimes I take them out just to see them, to take them in, in some context outside of under the streetlights or heavy snow. They have fingerprints, unique ones (I’ve checked), and all their palms tell different stories. The very last one says this: Goodnight. Maybe if it had been another father.
Rosemary
Upstairs they found a ball of bloody yarn and a naked lamb in the cradle.
Outside, she hid in the hayloft, and dropped down bits of bread and bran and baby and barley to the old ass below. It brayed, uncomfortable.
The Anatomy Of A Lumberjack (Study Conducted 04/08/19-11/20/20)
His Boots
What secrets, their tongues could tell!
Of weary treks through mud and dust and long-rough prickly grasses, sometimes raising up the forest’s voice in dry, rattling whisper, sometimes silently marking softened, earth-caked leather with dark, damp strips.
Of splintered and splintering wood, shards marking the kind brown earth like forest-jewels of white and ringed tan.
Of some forgotten, begotten apology spoken, boldly, into some sparkling morning’s dewy, misty air, into the beads of light that the sun scattered into that same air.
Of where those old graying mother-bones now lie.
Whether they were happy, finally.
What secrets, what stories!
(That they will only show, but never tell.)
His Hands
All that’s left are the calluses.
All that’s left are the calluses, the warmth in them.
All that’s left are the calluses, made out of some need to protect softer things.
His hands were large and warm and mean and crude. They were killing hands, wielding, part of a killing tool.
But it’s not nice to put it that way.
The Axe
It lies across the chest of his rumpled, ragged and rugged shirt, where he’d clutched it in his final moments, a bitter parting.
The head rolls, tumbles through the grassy void, still sharp, but sheen muted, dull.
And it’s beautiful, that barely there reflection of everything they’ve won, surrounding them.
(A longtime companion.)
It’s free.
His Flowers
They are rougher folk than the plump, happy little bumblebees and dormice are accustomed to.
Keratin, nails, wrapped in thick strands of graying hair, bundled into knobby little forms that sway slightly with the passing of a large, disinterested brown bear.
They are human, vaguely, but not human beings, per se.
With pebbles ensnared in knotty, tough gray fibers, edges made sharp, they hack at the stems.
There’s no one else to do it.
They carry the flowers with the mangled stems deep, deep, into the woods, to a grassy clearing, to an oddity.
Lay the flowers there, between the head and the hands, in the understanding in between.
You always were supposed to be self-sufficient.
The Trees
They carry on, and he has been both forgotten and forgiven.
Licorice Root Heart
It is hollow and bitter, and smells like old dreams burned in a fire.