Little Fugue

An apple paring curled from the knife wetly down my thumb— and what I had failed to do rightly touching that life next to mine, wearing late afternoon’s numb luminosity, impaled me. A hunter knee-deep in salt marsh, whom Anton Chekov might have set there and then left, back to doctoring, or choked off as too dark, wanton, met the steep flailing of teal, trailed their shrill lift, but stood only, hearing them. Pouring the last tea of an evening, dark amber alive, breathing in quintessence of India, I felt limber bark sheathing the shrub of my life’s tree with root good, but dense, dark, local, raw there, and so in dark woke, the seeing doctor, two simple profiles of linked characters in his air, cruel, good, a pair ample, true across that split yoke, true to its splayed force— simple so rare, though.