The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book

July

41 JULY Last night, in the distance, the pops and toothy whistles of rockets, booms of bombs, and strings of firecrackers rattling like rocks in a can. This morning, taking a walk at the lake, the revelers gone, the parking lot littered with flattened, dewy silence, red and gray, the hollow tubes, the burned-out cones, and all the duds, their fuses hissing right up to the edge of a bang that never arrived. All gone silent now, the sighs, the expectations, irritations and regrets, only the chirr of hundreds of swallows darting and diving , picking the last bits of smoke from the air. After the fireworks, tall palm trees of smoke drifted north on the wind, a floating island, ghostly, disappearing. But this was an illusion ; it was we who were passing, standing together on the lawn, leaving an evening behind. The fisherman’s shadow falls headlong into the stream, but the water pays no attention, makes no attempt to carry it off though it weighs less than a bobber, less than that soaked black leaf somersaulting along on the bottom, or that grain of sand stumbling behind. All afternoon his shadow swims against the current, growing so weak that by nightfall the least ripple can sweep it away. There are few perfect things in this world, and one of them is your common, everyday pound of butter, cool in its box, printed in 42 blues and greens with pleasant images—a farm, a farmer, a cow at a fence—and divided into quarters wrapped in immaculate paper as neatly tucked and folded as a soldier’s bunk, each section as easy to slide in and out as if riding on soundless rollers, like drawers in filing cabinets, two two-drawer cabinets placed side by side, the files packed in, manila, clean and fresh,with evenly spaced dividers arranged by the tablespoon. To press it to your cheek and then, with a fingernail, to carefully lift the triangular folds at each end, one end at a time, and then, without tearing the paper, to open the final flap and find there butter, yellow, pure, and flawless, too good to be true. There’s the ghost of a man still standing in these golf shoes here on a waist-high, thrift store shelf that bends just a little under his weight and opinions. His head’s in the shadowy, dusty upper shelves, in a country club of nail-hung tennis and handball rackets and under a Panama hat, disapproving of me. Big man, big leathery-smelling feet in their dried-out white buck golf shoes, fancy brown fringed tongues like the leaves of neglected plants. All variegated, too, with burn-like grooves from the suffering laces. I sit on the floor, leaned up against a stack of books, and slip them on. How smooth their insides are, shiny from years of loose wear. It’s like slipping right into his feet, into his life, and now I can I hear him above me, bellowing with outrage that someone like me, so not so country club, would presume to put them on. In this jar, just the weight of a heart, we have dark sorghum molasses , from an old woman’s hot sorghum patch next to a slough. Delicious in cookies, on pancakes, or cornbread. All natural ingredients : the waxy light that slides from willow leaves, the clatter of frogs, the invisible territory carved out of the summer and claimed by a red-winged blackbird, yellow clay from the sole of a JULY 43 comfortable shoe, itch of a chigger bite, light footfall of woodtick, a little flour from a cotton apron, the grassy fragrance of an old straw hat, arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, a few muttered judgments on neighbors, and the hard rubber tip from a cane. We are enjoying a light rain this morning, very rare these days, and people around here will be saying that, well, it didn’t amount to much but was enough to settle the dust. Settling the dust with a soft rain like this can be a whole day’s work for the weather, who gets paid by the job. Here in the farm store’s parking lot, between two pickups, is a tiny teeter-totter painted green, but no, it’s a praying mantis, with the bulk of its weight parked round and fat on the low end of the...