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CEDARVILLE
REVIEW
22
“She’s just resting.”
“She’s dead.”
“Hush, boy.”
A trick lingers over the freshly cropped field. Harvest come, harvest gone. Cats mate somewhere out
of sight, but I catch a glimpse of someone coming. There they are. Rigid, row after row after row.
“Why am I crying?” One by one, the deer decimate those ancient totems. I scream. Mother and
Father just want a good time. I just want comfort within so when I smoke some child might look
through the tree line and see an old man at ease.
If I decide that it’s tomorrow will the trees remove themselves? Will the dog chase after the reg-
ular deer? Dear, me. It’s all beyond my concentrated gaze. No more tricks, mother. No more
tricks, father. Let it be the evening. Let me run naked, howling, “What’s the matter, am I too fast?”
From the veiny leaves drop new born, deep deep through the fertile clay; and each darling seed,
each darling yet-to-be suckle potential so far through this randy supple bed that every where we
are naught wails as bloody beautiful life emerges.
And there they were. The beginning and the end. One all-consumable harvest of the young and
old and short and tall; every single piece—one moment of kinetic emotellect—rushing through
yesterday, through tomorrow, and back into this now.
So through a silky robe falling across the crack in our familial perimeter, draped on the four cor-
ners of where we have been, where we are, where we would like to be, and where we will be; I peer
inquisitively, nervously, unsteadily into the solemn harvest of my fore-mothers and fore-fathers;
my yet to be conceived seed covered in a faithful cold sweat of terror. My field is bare (bone).
Plowed and prepared, all ready for the night to come. And if the deer come to chew this putrid
sprout, may the little naked cowboys and little naked Indians slay the ghosts of my future dreams.
I might live forever in that crack, wary of tricks.