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  • Risk, and: Ode to My Boots, and: Full Moon over Larrabee Meadows, and: For Heather
  • Robert Wrigley (bio)

Risk

After he steps from the ladder to the limbsof the tree, he has to stop and holleran explanation to his wife, who's seen himfrom the house: A baby swallow,

he yells. It fell from the nest, and he knowsshe knows, though she does not say so,the idiocy of what he's doing, and he wisheshe'd simply smiled and waved hello,

knowing she will report the honest facts,after whatever authorities are calledto haul his broken-necked, stone deadcarcass away, and that this most importunate act

will become—and why should it not?—the awful joke his friends and neighborswill remember him by, as in his shirt pocketthe barely fledged bird chirps and chitters

and seems to stare not simply skywardbut directly into his lunatic eye,its tiny torrential swallow's heartwhirring just to the right

of his gigantic one thundering in the wind,the wind that took the bird from its nestand may also have taken the nest along,the wind which sways the tree west to east

and also brings to his ear a chirpidentical to the one risen from his pocket, [End Page 9] so that he studies a long time, looking upuntil he sees it, tucked not

into any part of the tree he's in,but in another ten yards awayand—sad to say—at a height some dozenfeet farther aloft than the one at which he already sways;

and yes, he sighs, and his wife come to the baseof the ladder implores him down, and downtherefore he goes, knowing she's thinking he'scome to his senses, this fool, this clown,

this reckless man she somehow loves despitethe foolishness he is capable of,such as, even now, letting go and pointing to the right,to the next tree, for some reason, and high above.

Ode to My Boots

Long hooves removed, sweat-stewedand leather-redolent. Foot hovels, lacescrosshatched up the fronts, tag ends untied,orphaned parentheses, speechless tongues,heels and soles rounded by miles. Black eggsfrom which pale birds have emergedthat step by step had flown wingless through the worldin them. The pale intermediaries, the socks,fat woolen blossoms reborn as budsin the pure soil of waiting in the drawer, sheathsto be entered for the entering of the shaft, [End Page 10] into the supple vamp, to be embraced by the welt,swaddled in the gussets and bound there,and bound also into the world, which acceptsthe boots as the boots accept the feet,earth which accepts the prints of the bootsas the boots accept the prints the feet leave in them,miles of motion memorialized as stillness.My hand reaching inside each bootreads the history of my walking there,which is nowhere and anywhere:ten tentacles of pivot and balance;the two balls of power; the arches, synecdochesof a million steps; and the heels of transitionand restraint. Fossils of perambulation,life and death masks of departure and return,blunt destinationless etchings of boot memory,these shed, heavy husks: years in them,though they have no notionof where they have been, and where,with luck, they may yet take me.

Full Moon over Larrabee Meadows

The elk move their shadows through the shadowof smoke from the cabin's chimney.Other than themselves, it is the only thingin motion in the woods tonight, and it is hard to knowif the enormous silence is part of such a vast stillness,or whether the stillness is a by-product of silence.As it is hard to know if the silence is silence at all,or just the white noise of the body straining to hear. [End Page 11] Though eventually the eyes adjust to moonlightand make out the vapors of all six animals breathing,and then the shadow each exhalation casts,also the dark paths they leavethrough grasses sheened with dew, turningmoment by moment, in silence, to...

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