Micah was missing again.
It was Easter, a slow spring.
Grandma swept the porch
and said “not one foot.”
Sitting on the tractor tire,
we peeled its tread and heard
the chime, made from deer bone —
ribs, jaw, etc. — and on that
evening, it seemed oracular.
Time is when it feels like it.
We wandered to the lake
where people fed old bread
to the gulls, the shoreline
a strepitous scourge of bare
hunger in flight. A little boy
almost ran off the wharf,
but someone caught him.
Sometimes, a bird would hover
sculpted by a gust. “Looks like
a photograph,” you said.
When we swim at night,
as we did then, we hold
on to so little, passing
through leaves stippled
in our wake. When my kids
ask what you were like,
I tell them about the plains,
where you moved, how it
once was an inland sea.
I tell them about wild rye
and bluestems — bottlebrush, too.
I tell them how you found
Micah in the dark, digging
hollows beneath the oaks
for two mice he had carried,
all day, in his jacket pocket.
Already have an account? Log in
Join KR for even more to read.
