At the End of the Day

 

John Shoptaw

​

​

“All this,” the grandfather whispered, indicating with a twitch of his head the Earth,

up here above Wildcat Creek on the wood-chipped school trail,

in an upper air where grownups speak to grownups

about matters thought to be over the heads

of children, like his grandson, Isaac,

looking up from a magnified

pill bug,

 

“would be better off without us.”  Then Isaac:  “Roly polies come from the ocean!”  

Wow!  I’d come from the other direction, from their near future,

to warn them about the coyote traipsing nearby,

sniffing around like a German shepherd,

now that their holes and thickets have

dried up, their blackberries

and rats. 

 

What worried me wasn’t the coyote’s snuffling so much as the grandfather’s whimper. 

If we’d never been?  Pitchblende inactive in its Plutonian depths,

age upon fossilized age piled up like a chronicle,

floods of wild emmer wheat,

continents shaggy with forests,

glaciers at their glacial

paces? 

 

But now?  The grandfather peered ahead.  Isaac hugged and leashed

Ramsay, a white poodle with an outsized bark, and seemed

to enlarge himself.  What were we coming to?  I bent

toward Isaac, with nothing to say, nothing

for the grandfather to overhear.  At a loss,

I waved, and Isaac smiled,

“Take care!” 

​

​

​