An old favorite

I know I have been back since August, but I am still finding old treasures in random boxes. I recently came across one of my favorite poems. Well not really a poem. I wanted to share it an I also wanted to save it to my computer so I won't lose it again.

OUTLINES
I hear Jon in the yard with his two small daughters who trace their bodies in chalk on the patio. The shapes are biomorphic, scrawled in green on pink pavement. The girls ask Jon for help. He takes the chalk. "All right, " he says, "I'll draw the outline and then you have to fill yourself in."

In the barn. The wood, the dust, and horse sweat. It all smells good like old books. We surprise and owl. It is white as moon and flies back and forth among the rafters and spangles of floating chaff. Back and forth like a trapped soul.

Why I like reading in the center of night by a dim light---only the words in the book are illuminated. Darkness around the edges of the page. Last night, reading William Maxwell at age 89, saying,"People die and then they're gone. I will never get used to it."

An autumn memory. Helping my mother gather leaves from the cottonwood and poplar. The rule was we had to catch them mid-air as they shivered off the trees. She taped the curled and yellow leaves to the limbs of a winter landscape that hung above the cat-scratched couch.

Once a blind woman, my student, asked if she could touch my face. In her reaching, I felt a bridge. Her fingertips pressed, more firm than I expected, repeatedly, in silence. Then she sighed. "That's what I thought," she said.

There was a man, a tourist from Michigan, who dies by himself in a motorcycle accident at the abandoned silver mill a mile from my home. The Sheriff said he'd been immobile but conscious for awhile. When he died I was the nearest person to him.

I recall spaces between falling leaves. Vacant air and shapes that stayed in place for only a moment.

When my mother dies, I took several pairs of her dress shoes with the idea of giving them away. But the dog got into the backseat of the car and scattered them from the cow pond to the asphalt road. I went walking in the valley and saw a magpie, black/white, in the sage-----breathless, still. I moved closer and realized it was my mother's shoe, a sleek spectator pump.

At the post office a teenage boy ahead of me, holding an envelope with the note or letter sealed inside, requests a stamp.The woman behind the counter says,"Would you like peaches, flags, or love?"

I looked for some evidence of the man's dying down by the old mill. A blood-stained rock or a chalked police-drawn body. What I found in the dust was the papery husk of a snake. Imagine that, to leave your skin without leaving your body.

by Gary Short

Hope you enjoyed. I love it.