Читать книгу The Lease - Mathew Henderson - Страница 10

They called him Bubbles before you met him,

flat-ass in the dirt working a snare, legs spread

like a child’s to catch and hold a rolling ball.

A man from a world without children,

he had no soft voice inside him.

He confessed it in every word, with a mouth

that knew only wood and steel, brick and earth.

His wooden hands grew into whatever tools

he touched. The day he recoloured the lease:

twelve hours of wordless painting

in prairie heat so heavy he was caught by it

like an insect trapped in the brush’s path,

licked into the colour of the pipe.

At shift’s end, you knew nothing about him,

but when you heard his name, pictured fresh red paint.

He kept one eye on a gopher hole,

closed the other to keep from blinking.

After an hour, stood suddenly with a struggling twine,

the noosed gopher scratching at air

as if the thickness of it might help him scramble out.

When he asked you what to do you spit seeds,

said, Retard. Eat it, fuck off.

Into the field until his arms go taut,

he stops, something looses inside him

and he swings the twine against the ground.

Five times, ten, until the string goes limp.

Rodent chirps on the first, and the second.

But by the third, there are already no sounds.