Paul Perry

In the field — shepherd’s purse: to be seen even in the dark. Think on it — after the gravel paths, after the roads — uneven and achingly long, across the cold promise the border makes to a sloping field, to a ditch. A ditch like any other. A ditch I have known — since. Imagine them: green, slender, from crown to root, a rosette of radical leaves, smooth, arrow-shaped and above them numerous small, white, inconspicuous flowers. There was no need to ask the man to kneel but he did, as if he were going to beg forgiveness, which he did not, nor did he ask for his life. He named his children and his wife, murmured to his own private God. Overhead, there was the sound of pine shifting, the moon winnowing in the distance. So, nothing terrible about the night then, if you do not count the earth tilting, or the sound in the undergrowth of a passage from this world to the next. More than that I remember the flat-seed pouch: weed some call it, as if to flourish and seed in the poorest soil is to be just that. They are everywhere now — it seems to me, populating my field of vision like a generative disease, an affliction. Look: a man walks into a field. A field with shepherd’s purse. He falls. He falls again. Every day, from this day until kingdom come, he falls into the embrace of a field of flowers, into shepherd’s purse.

October and the rain is warm the light moving across the water’s surface is there and not there like a voice you remember say your mother’s youthful as once she was on a day like this embracing the sunshine breaking through or watching it trace between her fingertips so real you can almost believe again in the silence between you, her breath on your cheek while you lay ill in bed and in only a moment a bell is ringing or your father is singing in the kitchen about strangers and without even an echo or the echo of an echo all of this is gone and we’re walking again to the Hellfire Club or the Sugar Loaf, it’s Sunday there’s not much traffic, and on the hills as you run twigs, and small black pellets are vanishing beneath your feet