Accomplished By Needles

Up before dawn with two hungry dogs, one of them also quite urinacious (the spotted menace has no such weakness, being of the Ancient Order of the Iron Bladder), and Mrs. Orr prepared breakfast tacos. We ate and talked of west Texas and her tough people and her immutable wind that scrapes across her lion-colored hide.

Jinx and I walked and watched cows bent to their unceasing cropping of grass, working their magic of transforming green blades into white milk. In the un-sunned early hours, we could hear the moist tugging of the grass into the soft lips, and an unseen owl in the enormous oak tree asked his eternal question in an Appalachian baritone.

We turned up into the old graveyard and prowled for a while among the lichen-spotted stones, and I read again the almost-eroded names and dates, snapping a salute to the lone Confederate soldier whose bones sleep under their blanket of rocky earth. Jinx came to me and peered into my face, and I thought of ghost stories and their hold on me, and of the true ghost story linked to our old farmhouse, one of which I have personal and tragic knowledge.

We returned home past the silage pit one of my neighbor has been filling all weekend, and my dog bounded to the top of the sweet-smelling mountain, chasing away the birds pecking there, then looking back at me with his white grin, and the cycle was much in my mind, the cycle of growing things providing food for living things, and the air was full of the hum of things past and my mind was full of the song Time To Say Goodbye, and we turned back to our home and passed beneath the arch of gold and yellow and green and moved from exterior to interior, though the interior is forever with me, and isn’t that one of the neat tricks of life?

And now Mrs. Orr and I have read the morning away, and she’s slicing things and preparing a stew, and I have dead-headed her limelight hydrangeas and puttered a bit in the gardens, and then this rushed into me, into my day, into my slice of time:

I come to the bowl, the concrete pool where the
winged ones sip and bathe, and its surface
is choked with the straw of the pine tree

reflected from above. I think to scoop them
out before I fill it again, but then
I see what use could be made of the needles,

the artist’s brushes, the brooms in miniature.
I gather some in my fingers and find that they can
scrub the bowl’s convex ocean floor,

erasing the simple lives of algae and dirt.
I rub and rub, and when I am done, I tip
the pool and empty the sludge and pine-straw onto

the ground. Then I lift the pitcher above
the bowl and make an offering of the clean
water, pouring until one is empty

and the other one full, and then I leave
the garden to the ones watching me from
the edges of their present paradise.

~ S.K. Orr