A Short Walk
Gay Brewer
To intimate silence is
a mistake, a mockingbird
purrs with sounds
you have never heard,
martins, jays, and doves
flickers and catbirds
the ruckus of trees,
the stillness of one rabbit
who turns and offers his
body, Christ that final
dream, no more sleep today,
streets hazy with
water, the only portion
of Sunday you can stomach,
an old car rattles past
a man heaves a newspaper
nods and turns for
the next street, yours,
then singing again,
you limped to the kitchen
surprised to hear rain
hammering the metal roof,
stood with a glass
in the dark
and thought, I should
stay in here tonight
if it weren't such trouble
an orange globe buoyed
between limbs, curbs full
with the last storm
chain saws for two days
to cut a way out,
the wood left as wet stubs
you'd like to think
yourself of this, the early
world of birds and mist,
of mud, of natural rhythms,
but a shoe squeaks
against your heel, the good
shoe without a hole,
and as a toadstool rises
almost from nowhere
a woman in pink
approaches on roller skates,
and you shuffle a ragged
human two-step across
the bruised flesh of earth
