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.