When I am old and walk myself insane
I’ll think about a hidden one day stand
In darkness with garages, ghosts and rain.
I neither should have seen you nor remained;
Our minutes that day will be our lifetimes
When I am old and walk myself insane.
I could love or abhor you just the same,
Quivering in youthful loving terror
In darkness with garages, ghosts, and rain.
Stranger, remember if you’re there again
I leaned in, whispered oath to remember
When I am old and walk myself insane.
And if again I cross that muddy lane,
I’ll search for traces of your soft spirit
In darkness with garages, ghosts, and rain.
And if sky starts crying mourning my pain
I’ll dry in that garage and shout my oath
When I am old and walk myself insane
In darkness with garages, ghosts, and rain.
(The Gimlet, p. 2)
Jerry filled the barrel plum full with gunpowder
and Tom plugged it with a gimlet handle. Steel.
“Who’s gon’ fire it?”
“You gon’ fire it?”
“I’m not gon’ fire it.” They were afraid the barrel would shatter
and blow their hands off.
Jerry tied one end of a piece of twine to the trigger,
forced the musket into a crook in a dogwood tree,
and led the other end behind a log.
They got down behind it.
Pulled the string.
Gun blasted with a sound
like fire down from heaven.
Musket flung back landing hard on the ground
in front of the log. The barrel hadn’t shattered.
“Goddamn.”
The gimlet handle had blasted clean through a solid oak
and was long gone.
It is told that three days la ter a gimlet handle
was seen passing through Danville thirty miles away
at about one o’clock.
A truck from the power company zipped past,
the driver neither seeing nor caring about me and the house.
Thirty- five years ago they flooded the valley
to make a reservoir; put up wires that electrified these parts.
Now they were putting the wires underground
to beautify the landscape. Too late.
Somewhere a chainsaw was biting, perhaps the musket dogwood.
My mind lit then on the yard of that Updike house a few miles
over in Lynch Station where I had lived for two years
with Mama, brother Steven, and Granny.
With Mama gone to work
and Granny smoking, arthritic, in the living room corner
on a scratchy red couch, mischief came easy.
Steven and I found ten Coke cans.
Under a hot July sun we cut away can-tops and can-bottoms
and electrical- taped the cylinders together.
The tenth can, uncut, we taped onto one end.
We had a cannon . . .
With a gimlet, we bored a small hole in the bottom
of the tenth can and filled it with lighter fluid.
We inserted a twine fuse.
We fit a green tennis ball into the mouth,
put our cannon across the stump
of a giant oak that Updike had cut down six months before,
and pointed it toward Danville.
We lit the fuse,
and ducked.
Cannon boomed loud enough to wake
a dead fawn,
shot back and landed softly in the grass.
It hadn’t shattered.
The tennis ball was gone.
Years later I heard the story of Jerry and Tom
for the first time,
and wondered whether anyone in Danville
had spotted our green tennis ball
passing through town.
Smiling, I made my way back
to Mama’s Ford and pulled out of the ditch.
As I drove away, I heard Jerry Whitworth giggling
somewhere in the trees.
©1985 BY JEFFREY STANLEY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.