Robert Fillman

Holiday Gift Guide

It’s the red and black checked wool
in the Penney’s catalog
that has me seeing the men 
in my life trudging into
the woods clad in their simple
huntsmen clothes, shotguns in hand,
their wide, square knuckles calloused 
by work I will never know.

They’ve taken tentative steps
through the spiked brush of my mind,
careful not to mistake me 
for prey, rattle against rocks
or twigs as the year closes
its brown-limbed husks around them.

I am watching from afar,
my eye traveling toward
their skeletons, rough-legged
movements behind hickory
and oak, the pages coming
alive with the frozen snap
of a blue Thanksgiving dawn.

It’s when I glide my fingers
across the printed paper 
that the season begins to
wither inside me, how those
glossy pages suddenly
feel like the shiny black coat
of a magnificent bear
now motionless, its purpose
lost, the men standing behind
its lifeless body smiling,
satisfied by my presence.  

I tell myself I will learn

the names of the flowers and
weeds in the garden, the birds
by their calls, knowing full well
I never keep that promise,
first remembering ninth-grade
biology, collecting 
leaves and stems, tearing them up
from the ground, patting them down
behind wax paper, getting
an F for mislabeling
even the dandelion,
dumping the homemade booklet
in the trash, thinking nothing
of it then, but now I am
left wondering which is this
and which is that as I hear
the high-pitched trilling of one
bird, a series of urgent
chirping notes from another,
resigned again to the same
old lie, reminding myself
that I never really learned
how to listen, all those times
we sat on the porch, your words
burrowing out of your mouth,
breaking loose like a season,
something about the sparrow
or brown creeper, one species
crawling headfirst up and down
the tree though I can’t seem to
recall which, or how to tell
grackles from other black birds
and crows, so many wild herbs
and trees, rocks and small rodents
you knew by heart, telling me
it’s nice to hold things like that
in your mind, the can of beer
level with your lip, tilted
just so, the brand that you loved,
whose name should be on the tip
of my tongue, slipping away,
as if it too had flown off
with the sparrow, beyond reach.

Back to Issue XIV…