The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Reamy Jansen MOSS for Paul They were here finally—the nature preserve sanctuary for birds and all other things living and growing He had taken the boy to see the sphagnum moss, said to be, said the sign, three thousand years old, enough millennia for him and the boy was nine No sign had to say that it was an Eden place of continued creation and protection deer and beaver ready to pose right out of Hicks evidence of their being mossy abandoned antlers and beech chips like medallions the pond killing and feeding black as mica in all its fine layers top one a speckled crisp of ice pierced by gray pines, stripped ragged by wind and water and there everywhere on every rocky surface green-gray pats of the moss ancient and fresh dabs you could gently lift being ordinary and wonderful as his father before him who didn’t quite reach one hundred. The moss couldn’t go anywhere except where it was. To be stroked gently, affectionately, the coarse green layers of it, as the boy did saying how soft it really was He told him moss was used to heal a wound but they seemed to have no need of that one thought. They left then, the boy bearing wood chip trophies as the father took in the fire tower off a bit and up the road. No one was there this time of year. Some days later the father stepped onto the porch of the small cabin in the woods and where days earlier he had tried to save a porcupine wounded, a small hole seared black below its growing quills of armor, and he was now arranging wild flowers in a Maxwell House can when he saw a wild turkey and then the hunter riding on the hood of a moving car, heels set on the bumper bracing the stock of a twelve-gauge on his knee with one hand the other he held a quart of Jim Beam and the son at a distance dancing against the field stone wall. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |