This Clumsy Living

Odyssey

27 Odyssey I sat in different places with different winds: at the top of the drive where the blue weeds grow; on the bench with hammering, the sound of a house I couldn’t see being built in the woods, child of a green womb. Rain was coming, clouds a scarf thrown across the sun. There might not be a spot that wants me, I could wander my yard and never fit this grass, the fence of rusted holes. Beside the tongue of a shovel left out overnight, I lay my head, my fingers four more dreams a daddy longlegs touched in a blind world, there’s that longer leg that’s not a leg, it’s a telegram sent out before the progress of a shadow. The feel of things, if I cherish, helps me live more like a minute than a clock. Rain crossed my neighbor’s field at the speed of a million mouths per second kissing corn. Just before my house, it stopped, then started on the other side of my life with a sound like the valley being told to hush. At the mailbox, I saw the mailbox had been beaten again, I sat, looked down the road at the fallen loaves of metal bread. This is a ritual like dinner, like wanting to know the secret the bat tells the hands of the boy who leans out of a car, lit by radio glow and a cigarette. In some, the refrain of blood is swing away. If you put your ear to such a person, you hear the ocean saying let me out. Some days, it takes me a year to get the mail, to return home with proof that we owe. There’s a stick I’ve had my eye on, I’ll ask tomorrow if it’s ever considered being thrown. ...