1.
"Not six inches, not a foot and a half. A foot apart. Like this." And she shows us, a well-practiced arm reaching into the bucket, flinging a seed potato into the furrow, and back in the bucket like the motions were one. We fumble along afterwards, tossing our potatoes haphazardly at best, most of them falling closer to six inches or eighteen than twelve. But ten people can do in an hour what would take all day for two, and I don't think she will complain. Later we pull rocks from the field, tossing them into piles to be added to the big pile on the south end. I think of Andean terraces, a thousand years of rock pulling, generation upon generation, until the impossible slopes yield food.
2.
The truck in front of me is turning. I have just finished taking a swig out of my water bottle and put my hands back on the wheel when a car pulls out of the intersection, the driver looking the other way and apparently oblivious to my little Volvo behind the big truck. I swerve madly, my life perhaps indebted to the break in oncoming traffic, and don't remember to honk until I am far past. At home, I write to him that I love the way I do - hard, and all at once - because I have no faith in permanance, no reason to believe either of us we be here to love later. The taste of death is still in my lungs.
3.
The taste of death is still in my lungs. And I'm going dancing.
"Not six inches, not a foot and a half. A foot apart. Like this." And she shows us, a well-practiced arm reaching into the bucket, flinging a seed potato into the furrow, and back in the bucket like the motions were one. We fumble along afterwards, tossing our potatoes haphazardly at best, most of them falling closer to six inches or eighteen than twelve. But ten people can do in an hour what would take all day for two, and I don't think she will complain. Later we pull rocks from the field, tossing them into piles to be added to the big pile on the south end. I think of Andean terraces, a thousand years of rock pulling, generation upon generation, until the impossible slopes yield food.
2.
The truck in front of me is turning. I have just finished taking a swig out of my water bottle and put my hands back on the wheel when a car pulls out of the intersection, the driver looking the other way and apparently oblivious to my little Volvo behind the big truck. I swerve madly, my life perhaps indebted to the break in oncoming traffic, and don't remember to honk until I am far past. At home, I write to him that I love the way I do - hard, and all at once - because I have no faith in permanance, no reason to believe either of us we be here to love later. The taste of death is still in my lungs.
3.
The taste of death is still in my lungs. And I'm going dancing.
nice work. and you make it look easy, which tends to make me both jealous and grateful.
oh yeah. the 'easy' part deludes the weaker-minded among us to imagine doing something similar, which most often amounts to a cull of the gene pool if we're talkin' formula 1, or trapeze stunts without a net.
but writin's tricky. pound was right.
thanks.
Posted by
Anonymous |
14/4/06 02:45