Poppa Took My Hand

           I finally wrote “The End” to novel #4 - “Been A Bad Ol’ Booger But He’s Come ‘n’ Gone”.  It’s a grandfather-granddaughter story that still needs work. The following is another excerpt. 

Please stay tuned.

Poppa took my hand and led me through the copse of ancient hemlocks as if I needed his protection. It was early spring. Daffodils had come up but lilacs were still a week away, mountain laurel three weeks from that. Jays were gone. Chickadees back. A blue heron fished the creek. We had to spray the dumpster with ammonia to keep a hungry bear at bay. Coyotes ambushed a raccoon near the chicken coop. All that was left of it were strands of grey and white hair. Coyotes eat everything but a gland in the anus. No sign of that, either. A morsel for something else. 

Poppa normally never hesitated to talk about anything at all, but this morning he stayed silent as we walked, setting his feet as if he were hunting, almost reverent, unwilling to disturb the peace. We stopped at the edge of a clearing where Poppa indicated something out there with his chin. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to see, but I followed him as he walked into the clearing until...There. Unclear to me until I moved closer. I had never seen anything like this before or since. Poppa had, but once. The racks and bones of two massive deer, thick-necked bucks with ten point racks, stout as cudgels, tangled, twisted, ultimately locked together, trapped, having fought until they died, socket to socket, smack against each other’s sight and smell, socket to socket, until they died. Much of the rest of them had been strewn about the clearing, vandalized by varmints, but those two skulls, now blind, remained, for eternity, locked in mortal combat.

A few days later, I found this on an index card that had fallen on the kitchen floor.

Talk to me of death

And I will tell you of a woodland dance

Hemlocks - a thick grove of them

A fitting place

A pas de deux - both dead

Like Romeo and Juliet

Only rivals

Beams eight points and ten

Thick as cudgels

Entangled by their horns

     And not their hearts

Titans locked in deadly battle

Crashing heads

Bucking for the “A” list

Eighteen tines tangled and trapped

Eye socket to eye socket

Call this place 

     Ozymandias

Someone with that name

Ruled over ancient ruins

This inscription left

  On a piece of stone:

“Look on my works and despair.”

Seed unspread

Scattered bones

Picked clean

Antlers gnawed by mites

     With yellow teeth

Ozymandias

  “Look on my works and despair”

Scattered bones don’t even get that.