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Poetry || SubmissionsFour Poems by Richard BearLettuce in Winter The potting room was a miserable dank shed, trash-chocked, roofed in plastic, with blackberries ingrown amid the jetsam. He dragged it all into the light, sifting for tools or nails, then consigning the rest to dump runs. With one son, the quiet one, he re-roofed the room with scraps from the house roofing, and installed used windows. On the south, a sliding door turned on its side served for a greenhouse. A friend's timely offer of a chimney to salvage solved the question of how to floor. With his other son, the tall one, he rented a forty-foot ladder and picked bricks out of the air, frightened half to death. They piled them by the plant-room door, and the girl, last child, brimful of jokes and laughter, brought bricks one by one, and he cleaned and set them face up in a herringbone pattern. She swept sand and mortar into the cracks, and danced in the sun which already had warmed the red clay. Now for A bench, painted green, the color of wishing, and pots of all sizes, flats too, and a tall can for watering. He hankered for lettuce in winter, and sowed flats in October. After a month, the wild geese and their music gone south, he noted the seedlings were spindly and sad, so picked up a hammer and some two-by-six, and built a quick cold frame with the other half of the always helpful sliding door. Outside on the south wall in the duck pen he framed it, and dibbled the seedlings within. They liked that, but darkness comes on in December; after a full day, all week, one comes home exhausted to eat and sleep, not to water a garden. One thing only has saved the lettuce: the ducks do not like coming in for the night. He goes out in the dark to disturb them; they rush home complaining, as the madman hops and chuckles. He locks them away from coyotes, and turns, most briefly, to visit his seedlings. By feel he gives them their water, and tends them, his hands stretching toward summer in the unseen leaves. It finds you It finds you when it wants you, not before: This time it found me among three dozen strangers gathered to watch the earth eclipse the moon. "There you are: let's go see the house we built years ago, when first we settled on this land." I followed her, watching the rhythms of her hips, envying her husband, as she strode easy among the white barked alders, setting aside tall bracken with her hands. We came to a road strange for having known only horses. After, to a grove of firs, second growth, arrow straight, full of grey lights. She showed the house, its drunken roof. I drank in every word, not to hear her sorrows, but to love her voice. She bent among weeds, small hands uprooting something small. "Here: you need to take this home with you; water it good, okay?" I stood desiring her, and not her apple mint; holding the first of my gardens in my hand. Beech Lake Spring, and spring of my life also and life returns to the long green lake, new water striders, and rustlings below of bream bug hunting beneath long limbs of beeches and slow movements of old men fishing in shade of same: walk down to the water and stand sun-hot behind sedges, shoes wet, thinking of snakes. And then snakes come; first one, lazily, tail stroking, head high, counter clockwise along the shore, and then another. And then another. All going the same way round. Next day, incorrigible youth, I rig a black fly rod with stout green line tied at butt end and tip end, a snare. Back to the sun-long lake, the deep bream, and the fishermen. The snakes continue their rounds. Cast loop, and wait. One comes! riding high in clear water, black eye bright. Caught, the writhing, angry thing bends the rod double almost. On close inspection I pronounce its name: common water snake. Proudly I reach for the looped lithe body and it turns, sinking four rows of teeth deep in the base of my thumb. Shamefaced, I let the bright creature go; it swims sedately, maddeningly counter clockwise: nothing has happened to change its agenda. Rod forgotten, I sink to my knees among sedges, and watch the fishing men quietly fishing in their beech-shade, shading my eyes with my still throbbing hand. He sighed He sighed; we could not reach his vision. But perhaps there was a way: he turned his eyes to the casement high on the classroom wall. There are four panes there, right? Yes, sir. Ignore, for, a moment, then, the years of dust, the brown recluse crouching in her corner, and the crack of doom from there to upper left. See each pane as a pipe, with water of life pouring through to make some desert bloom. Each is a two-inch pipe. Now, how big a pipe, boys, is the whole window? Now we could see what the old man saw: a four inch pipe, four times the water, and not two. This, and the brown recluse, and the crack of Doom, and our young lives straining at belt and collar, sweating in the basement of the old school gym, we would not forget. We felt his intellect as our own, and for once we were afraid to shrug, to lift our brows, to disdain this world of men that so suddenly dwelt among us. Late in the afternoon, while the sun still beat the schoolyards flat with its authority, I stepped among the cool beech copses, heading for my usual hickory grove. No birds were singing, nor were there voices of insects. This is the beginning, I said, though I was unsure of what. My childhood lagged; it sat in the shade of the trees, calling me by my forgotten name, while I walked on, and on, never heeding. Richard Bear attended Georgia State University and took his BA and MA degrees from the University of Oregon. He lives in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, USA, with his family of five, plus assorted ducks, geese, rabbits, cats, and tomatoes. He plays the dulcimer and the pennywhistle. You can write to him c/o rbear@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Today's Situation
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