-
Comprehendest Thou This?
Comprehendest Thou This? Here, honey, I’ll let you out, I said, And twisted the knob and pushed the screen, and out Into the muggy twilight she went, tail Curved over her brindled back. Why Do you talk to it as if it understands You? he said, his face the same sneer As his entire stretch of decades of life Had been. I stabbed back with How do you know She doesn’t? Whatever bad smell he carried in his Nostrils seemed to worsen as he put His head to the side and hissed Every rational Person knows animals don’t comprehend Human speech. I met him with And where Did you learn…
-
The Thirteenth of August
Today would have been her 103rd birthday, and her absence these nine years has left a divot on my life’s surface. I miss her, and I am glad she isn’t here to see what has become of her country and her region. Seeing such ugliness would have grieved her tough, hidden old heart. Her middle name was Viola, which she hated. I always loved it, thinking it had a Southern literary lilt to it, like Eudora or Flannary, and I would sometimes address her by it, which enraged her. “Viola,” I’d say, “Reckon what it would take to get you to make me some bacon for supper?” And she would…
-
Wanderings, Wonderings
There’s a certain liquid but frictioned struggle when I walk through the grass in the morning after it rains. My feet, less sure now, more prone to missteps and the cruelty of unbalancing, skim through the green sea of clover and vetch, leaving long strokes like ski tracks behind me. But I do not turn to look at these tracks as I walk, because I do not trust my own footfalls. This, then, is what aging is: a gradual mistrust of all the powers and agile techniques and reflexive movements that I once took for granted, like a good Catholic who, when he sees death’s cowled head bobbing up over…