from Report from the Hall Society, Vol. 1 No. 1
are we more than the height above our toes
and the residual torque from our birth muck? gotta be,
yeah? a snag grabs a sock. a toenail clipped grows.
a torn one tears to blood, but grows, inevitably.
I retrieved the worm whose dirt I shovelled
into the puddle. grateful for mistakes I can fix.
a knife used for decades wore itself down to the hilt.
a useless stub of a scraper like a pencil of no use,
kept.
until it wasn't. lost with dad's stuff. what the deuce
was lost
in the shuffle?
jokers mislaid. never had use for them.
missing metal implied by all the knives that are
in mind complete. repetitions speak in the ghost
blade.
the partial is seductive more than the revealed, the raw
data of everything, minutiae insisting on paralysis of
no need
to decide.
but the complete and honed is sharp enough
for the carrots and saves the arms and teeth some
work.
shall we, Phil, exchange our childhoods for a roll
call of their
nostalgia. what would we lose? injury
still propels but glowing….?
those were green-skied stormy days, lightning rod
children
and winds that swayed trees that were freer hearts
than ours.
while I fled the chop of Mississippi Lakes, the waters
well, it did as water does & closed over troughs
as angels sealed the mouths of Daniel’s lions. community
patched over, fibreglass over rusty hole in barn
roofs.
gumdrop people remain in place, walk the shorelines
we escaped. drink from that rising and falling water
table.
the old ones then were only in their thirties. who
knew
anything before forty. (at eighty our cutoff will be
sixty.)
how i watched the waves, dizzying myself tracking droplets
and made for furthest shores as fast as I knew how.
us book-marked
flop-flippers. wind keeps catching whatever page we
were on.
doesn't matter. act of sitting with is the thing.
at the funeral the thin became opaque. his fugues
sublimated to vapour. memories of humour sit in his
chair.
one mismatched couple over thirty years shifted
energies,
his sped and hers slowed. how not to ask, what if
I became inert a while, locked as a carved barn owl
until my vole appeared. (I forget I can be detected.)
(so much time watching, in my hide, in my hidden
divide of people like me vs. incomprehensible
novelties.)
a man who was alone then, smiles easily, banters.
I never saw him so happy with his ex wife. it was
beautiful.
it was as if he was metal waiting for the welding
torch
and there she is, generic, petit, from the outside,
beside him.
a couple who had split in my time, are together again.
(three funerals in a row must count as real.)
the rain held off while it could and it suited our
plans.
now it comes and what of it. we were always muddy
water.
Lac Notre Dame, May 2, 2022
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