“
Now reading
Shyness of the Muse in an Almond Orchard
The gray-green husks are opening. The wasps and spiders build up high. The vulture steps in from the field adjacent and waddles down the row, first to claim the rabbit clipped by the mower. Dust mates with heat and spins at the least movement. It's lonely for him but he doesn't know it. Crouched atop his tractor, he wheels out of a corridor of trees, wobbling on huge, flat-sided clods, and turns to re-enter, stripping gears, engaging the mower's blades against the silence. The stand is deep enough to have a heart with nothing human in it, but a heart, webbed and humming and afraid. At twilight, when he grinds through on his engine, buck, doe, and fawn unfold their knees and disappear like birds. And I, as yet unimportant, am unseen, unrecognized, unknown, under the drooping boughs he has to lift, slowing and downshifting, his T-shirt pocked with snags, his smooth chest bleeding. A branch recoils and whips across his back. Away from that, from leaves and mantises that prickle his arrns and face, out in the open evening, he feels taller- twenty years old, determined to remember heat, dust, and sound,