Raking
Rent from DeepDyve- Raking
From a distance, you might think I’m practicing a waltz here in my yard, dance being the gathering of motion into an order. The sweeping moves pull through the arms and shoulders and from the trunk too, the body’s core. I’ve made a neat pile.
And then the wind, the leaves other partner, comes and swirls them, making its own music for a dance, dance being the release of order into motion, the light touch of the hand to the small of the back, the leaves unstacking in turns and steps across the yard, precise randomness, scatter’s two-step. [End Page 128]
Michael Chitwood, a native of Rocky Mount, Virginia, is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published seven collections of poems and two of prose. His work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Poetry and numerous other publications.
