Outlines

by Gary Short

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 so good like old books. We surprise an 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 illumined. Darkness around
	the edges of the page. Last night, reading William Maxwell
	at age 89, saying, "People die and 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 in 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 died 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 the spaces between falling leaves. Vacant
	air and shapes that stayed in place for only
	a moment.

When my mother died, 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 cowpond 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 the 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.

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