Short Story About an Ordinary Man

Short Story About an Ordinary Man

william likes to play canfield
and write about small objects,
like woodland creatures with little yes-eyes
bright as pine nuts tarred up, with frilled hairs
and tiny paws, and the clicking nails on them,
and he likes to live
in Idaho green and garbled
with its flatland hills and houses
and tails of grass and wheat tufting up.
william too often feels like he is wearing
another man’s life like badly fitting boots
which insist on pinching him.
in the mirror william thinks
his nose is the size of a lopsided tumor,
or a half deflated balloon,
and he wittles his hours watching it,
shavings of time curled on the sink like tiny claws.
william thinks his nose cannot be his own,
as are Idaho and his tales of
“this little chipmunk
   has a bright little nose
   that twitches and glints”
in Idaho, which is where
Scribner’s Panic Grass blooms.
it grows all around william’s
little house wrapped in the close sky
and blooms in Spring, when all grasses and wheats bloom,
when ground squirrels
are most brazen and bedizened,
when william takes a ball-peen hammer,
which is usually used for tapping punches,
to his nose and it splits open like a flushed kernel of wheat.

A Nervous and Steady Progression of Many Bellies

A Nervous and Steady Progression of Many Bellies

In winter, this girl had been cold. Of
course and of there being no
salt pork stored away.
Her hands had been cut from
twisting hay to burn and
the ox in the dining room
had lowed at its food embering.
She had eaten the space between
his scarceness, his legs
had been no wider
than the bones beneath which
she had boiled over a stove of wheat.

The spangling train gleamed
in spring flowering with
sacks of beans and turnips
and trout and caribou, barrels
of yogurt and hominy,
and boxes of barley sugar.
This girl smelled of something
musky and peppery.
She shimmered through
the long grass and suckled
on clove candy ribbons.

The summer is as lumbering
as this girl, her breadbasket bulging.
She bloats on the front porch
eyeing pumpkins in her fields,
lumbering bees mating carelessly,
the oxen glowing with plump grains.
Juice drools down the sky’s chin,
pooling in sticky dribbles on the porch.
This girl blows balloons and rubs
their fat sides with butter.

That girl will give birth in crisp
weeds to a puking mewling
little girl. This girl will
squat and relieve herself on tight
sacks of corn and sit her rawboned bottom on
a fat squash. The slick train will
weave in like a corn snake, carting
duck cracklings and hickory
bacon and glancing autumn light.
This girl will glint at the train
which will spark back. She will clamber on
with clicking knees,
hitching the quickest spin out of her own century.