Michael McClintock: AFTERNOON GARDEN

For the time being, well past noon, God, I ask that you above all leave me alone, that I might just sit here in the leaf shade, beside the wall with its swallow-thrown shadows and the easy, unmended thoughts time affords me: these solid forms of pots, flush with zinnias, and the sun patch fading where the grass snake glides unknotted.

a hollow tree
the beginning
of dusk
.

.

by Michael McClintock
Fresno, California
first published in Anthology of Days (Backwoods Broadsides, No. 70)