Paul Bowers
Fence I know where it is, that thin eternal boundary you sometimes sense on the surface of your ribbed and vesseled skin and taste at your tongue's salty tip. It lies at the crux of a pipe-and-cable fence, beyond which a broad pasture spreads that does not belong to me. I sometimes lean on my elbows over the familiar top rail, foot tensed like a threat on the taut, lowest cable, only to relax back into the private property of my animal body knowing it is not the climbing time, yet. Door The nouns are easily assembled: hinges, sill, jamb, knob, lock and strikeplate; as are the simple terms for simple tools: screwdriver, level, bit and drill, wood saw and plane. Even the empty entrance framed, the absence unwritten, is assumed by nouns around it. But the verb to open what is finally made, like a lightening bug that fires too far afield to capture in a jam jar and stun a child with moving light, escapes collection: except by distant illumined reflection. Deer Mice It is this simple: I scoop the wet food from the can and feed the dogs in equal portions. The spoon, still slicked with meaty sluice, I place upon a shelf in the shed. By morning, the spoon is clean. Do they, ala Beatrix Potter, bring their own flatware and napkins? Are there rowdy children in light summer skins circling the feast, too playful to eat until the meal grows cold, and old mice-men smoke cigars in dusty overcoats? Or is it the lone, cautious animal life, as all life is, that eats and forgets, night after night, the gift I left, but thanks me, although we are not acquainted and hardly speak the same language, with the syllables of his firing tendril tongue? Essentials We are not tethered balloons Or wombed, umbilicaled unborn spirits, anchored, stitched, or grappled in flesh. The sun does not slip into the underworld and reemerge with stolen fire. We do not meet our loved ones in a clean room of light, like a farm kitchen at midnight, and reminisce about our work done or what we left undone. There is no eternal seam between the ticks of the clock anymore than fall is the dying of life or spring the birth of things. This is not to say I didn't mourn when I found the house wren chick, more skin than feathers, drowned in the water bucket I set out for the dogs to make them happy, only that when I scooped the light wet knot of bird silk and curled claws that grasped at nothing and tossed inertness over the pasture fence, I knew, when I released the body to the air, nothing took flight that wasn't there. PAUL BOWERS teaches writing and literature at Northern Oklahoma College—Enid. His short story collection, Like Men Made Various, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2006. |