Roy Scheele

Her hand is at the feedbag at her waist, sunk to the wrist in the rustling grain that nuzzles her fingertips when laced around a sifting handful. It’s like rain, like cupping water in your hand, she thinks, the cracks between the fingers like a sieve, except that less escapes you through the chinks when handling grain. She likes to feel it give beneath her hand’s slow plummet, and the smell, so rich a fragrance she has never quite got used to it, under the seeming spell of the charm of the commonplace. The white hens bunch and strut, heads cocked, with tilted eyes, till her hand sweeps out and the small grain flies.

The heat shimmer along our street one midsummer midafternoon, and wading up through it a horse’s hooves, and each shoe raising a tongueless bell that tolled in the neighborhood, till the driver drew in the reins and the horse hung its head and stood. And something in a basket thin as shavings (blackberries? or a ghost of the memory of having tasted them?) passing into my hands as mother paid, and the man got up again, slapping the loop from the reins, and was off on his trundling wagon.

Tree, we take leave of you; you’re on your own. Put down your taproot with its probing hairs that sluice the darkness and create unseen the tree that mirrors you below the ground. For when we plant a tree, two trees take root: the one that lifts its leaves into the air, and the inverted one that cleaves the soil to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf in the eternal blackness of that sky. The leaves you show uncurl like tiny fists and bear small button blossoms, greenish white, that quicken you. Now put your roots down deep; draw light from shadow, break in on earth’s sleep.

Something almost Flemish about that water, a golden brown but clear into its depths, the plank-ends of the dock a fading gray beside it, and a boat moored at the end; something, it seems to me in looking back, about a murky bullhead on a stringer, one of those rope ones you can hardly see, so that the fish appeared to scull in place; something (the details start to widen now) about white wooden clapboards on the side of that inn or tavern where my dad had stopped, a neon beer sign staring out through glass— late in the afternoon, I drinking deep of everything I saw, now mine to keep.