Survey: Last Reading

SURVEY: LAST READING / Dave Baker My father's teaching me to map the land, the wild, rock-wretched Ozark foothills not an hour's drive from home. I can't see him: but across the mud-choked gulley, through ivy, up a hill gnarled with vines, his two legs delicate behind the tripod's three so that the plumb-bob hangs breathless, pointing straight to hell, he's got me sighted like a grazing animal about to feel the arrow tear its life apart. We've been at it all day long. I poke around one last time to locate solid ground, steady my ten-foot rod marked in red inch-slivers, then slowly, so as not to blur his vision, rock it back and forth. He needs to get the highest reading, lightly guiding his scope until he focusses, shoots, then fixes it in his book. Good, his echo bangs. Minutes later he scrambles up unscratched out of huckleberry vines, flops down, sharpening his mechanical pencil like a switchblade, beginning to subtract. So what's it like? He means: to teach. He's anxious for his aging, bachelor, doctor son who reads poetry. I think of twenty freshmen 248 · The Missouri Review whom I love for fifty minutes three times a week at one o'clock, whom I teach to slice the hide off words until they bleed clean, digestible, dead. "They'll do," I grin. What? He flings a pinecone at a squirrel who chirrs, drops his walnut, claws around to the shade-side of his maple tree. "Whatever I say." We both know better. His figures show we're exactly five too many elevenths of an inch off whack from where we started. I fail to see the problem. But when we track down to the car, loaded behind equipment, my feet slip wild through the moss, branches cut me, the clouds I steer by blur and divide in the shifting sky, and all my mapper's tools beat their wings against my chest to get away, to fly above this world too imprecise to let a good day's work get done. Dave Baker The Missouri Review · 249 ...