Bless the Beasts
Timothy Nolan
Morning sun lights up the ecosystem of pond scum like a floating Milky
Way. All Vermont’s green, just starting to yellow, permeates the September
air. A chorus of crickets gets interrupted by squawks and bird song. Across
the way the Sisters of Mercy have probably been up for hours cleansing
their already pure souls, looking for God in the muck, listening for his voice
in the hum between the feathered faithful, the multi-legged masses, and the
unseen gilled below the surface. But you, Knox, lumber like a lion at 100
pounds. You fling a foot-long garter snake around like it had a neck to
break. Your sad eyes summon a stream of old Irish faces in yellowed photo
albums. Lie down like a sphinx and track the eagle, Mort or Moira, one of
the pair as named by the locals. Watch it glide the full expanse of sanctified
water. Don’t let the mallards dipping in and out break the spell.
Timothy Nolan (he/him/his) is a writer and visual artist living in Palm Springs, California with his husband and their rescue dog, Scout. He has exhibited extensively for three decades and his work is in the collections of the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco, and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. He’s been a fellow at Yaddo, Ucross, and Djerassi. His poems appear in The Hudson Review, Fourteen Hills, Puerto del Sol, and Roanoke Review, among others.
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