Resting
After the Fall
Where else
would you settle down for a long rest
but in the
folds of a hammock,
and if you
were a mouse
you might
find one, bunched up
like
string in a large paper bag,
in the
attic where you had come in from the hard winter,
tired at
last from running between snowbanks and grain.
The man
who had fallen out of the tree
rested
beside her on the wide bed,
the attic
window propped open to catch air,
and as
afternoon drifted off
the image
would come to her of the small, dead mouse
curled up
in the bag with the hammock,
how
perfect all its features were, skin on bones,
and how
she had flung it, a short way,
into the
berry vines and tangle behind the barn door,
the
skeleton landing on rock,
the spine
curved, motionless in sleep.
And as
they rested together she thought
of the
curve the man's body made as he fell,
the apple
tree branch snapping beneath him,
dropping
him like a heavy sack to the earth below,
and how
she, rounding the corner,
was not in
time to catch him,
and so
held him
now
all the
more tightly in her arms.