April Dusk, Wassergass Dull pewter light on the pond fringed with the green shadows of trees across the road, the sky one big pewter cloud it’s hard to look straight into, all that glare that says there’s more light up there than we can bear, which makes me remember Matthew’s The lamp of the body is the eye, even as I feel mine burning, spring allergies, I’d thought, the pollen and dust, the long days of sun holding on, one minute more, then another till it’s eight o’clock, my wife and I still out on the patio with a little talk as the darkness filters in, taking the spruce and fir and hemlock then the barn, then part of her face turned up toward the hill, her shoulder, arm, my leg, foot, bit by bit till we’re nothing but voices, and most of the time not even that.
Sequence My son out in the dark picking the last tomatoes and peppers he’s weeded and mulched and watered all summer the night of the first frost here, the TV announcer almost shouted, so he went out with the flashlight I watched him tuck in his jacket pocket to pick his crop, and I wanted to ask if I could help, I wanted to say I could hold the light, I wanted to say I should never have let him ride his bike what, seventeen years ago? on Wassergass Road where the heavy Buick sent him flying over a hundred feet, his atrophied leg, his right eye lower than the left, his inability to sequence more than three steps at a time, steps to write an essay, steps for three time blocks before and after lunch, steps to solve for X, but I kept quiet, sat flicking the remote control while the door clicked and I saw his light zigzag up the black till he got to what we both knew was the gate, the thought then of lifting the latch while holding the flashlight under his chin or in his mouth, and third, the easy swinging out.