William Johnson

There are times when all the chutzpa I can muster isn't enough, fug and bluster all I can do, and damned if it doesn't just stand there, legs straddling a berm of washboard dust-ruts and in late noon sun stare me blue in the face: lord, we could almost trade places, my back strained by the weight of those great bone wings, my tongue itching for lily root. And musk, lord, the pheromones, a day so sweet with elderberry's too rank fume I could die twice over snuffing. While the truck mumbles and a trout spanks the cooler, I almost outdo myself. But reason, that too-convenient shortcut, creeps back, if only so far: the rest as we say is silence, dust and the sputter of flies and when lumbering to go it pauses and throws me its last worst look its sorrow is Christ's, dewlap jeweled, a beatitude of moss.

In the woods off Ivory, just out of car-shot it’s not enough to say a mouse lies snug in a crib of roots, its fur sleek as babyskin, Lord the body warm. Too often a name subverts the pang it answers for, inwit of heart-light, the epiphanic clutch. I mean do you sense with more than a chill the tiny homely lumpliness of it there in the dirt as you orphan the dim of a cold October sun, no wound I can find anywhere on its, your, my small soft bodykins—yikes its left ear (the inner skin pink delicate svelte) twitches a little and I have this before thought tricks it whimsically lovely wink of the soul as mouse-force taking wing until the O-no letdown when a yellow jacket backs out, O sweetmeat funk and dandle of the brain asputter as it launches over frost-curled leaves and dollarweed seed strewn on the path like medallions glimpsed the second we— I mean all of us cold in the twilight—fly.

Dog days doggone dog-tired dogwork of summer, mowing the grass we're all coming to the dog tags of you, me, I, we, stashed in a box, doghouse throwaways. Even the namesake tree whose blossoms some call Jesus-flowers for the rust-grooved tips of the petals as if nails now removed had indented the shape of a cross, betrays my mood how all those springs ago seeing our tree nailed with bloody after bloody crucifix I said this beauty's no foo-foo and sure enough my dog-weary dearie mowing today, the spring long gone, I brush a limb on whose tired leaves mites amble the edible thoroughfares and as if to confirm it, our neighbor's mutt runs along the fence yapping dogwood dogwood dogwood as the mower chugs on, our train leaving for the city beneath the grass.