Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay

Bringing the Shovel Down

 

Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars

I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest,

 

I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will, and in the meantime neglect, Love,

the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend,

 

instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth

and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings;

 

and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak,

so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids

 

who spin a yarn about Max like I’m singing to you, except they tell a child,

a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes

 

to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them,

and combining in their story the big kids make

 

the boy who shall remain unnamed believe Max to be sick and rabid,

and say his limp and regular smell of piss are just two signs,

 

but the worst of it, they say, is that he’ll likely find you in the night,

and the big kids do not giggle, and the boy does not giggle,

 

but lets the final berries in his hand drop into the overgrowth

at his feet, and if I spoke the dream of the unnamed boy

 

I fear my tongue would turn an arm of fire so I won’t, but

know inside the boy’s head grew a fire beneath the same stars

 

as you and I, Love, your leg between mine, the fine hairs

on your upper thigh nearly glistening in the night, and the boy,

 

the night, the incalculable mysteries as he sleeps with a stuffed animal

tucked beneath his chin and rolls tight against his brother

 

in their shared bed, who rolls away, and you know by now

there is no salve to quell his mind’s roaring machinery

 

and I shouldn’t tell you, but I will,

the unnamed boy

 

on the third night of the dreams which harden his soft face

puts on pants and a sweatshirt and quietly takes the spade from the den

 

and more quietly leaves his house where upstairs his father lies dreamless,

and his mother bends her body into his,

 

and beneath these same stars, Love, which often, when I study them,

seem to recede like so many of the lies of light,

 

the boy walks to the yard where Max lives attached to a steel cable

spanning the lawn, and the boy brings hot dogs which he learned

 

from Tom & Jerry, and nearly urinating in his pants he tosses them

toward the quiet and crippled thing limping across the lawn,

 

the cable whispering above the dew-slick grass, and Max whimpers,

and the boy sees a wolf where stands this ratty

 

and sad and groveling dog and beneath these very stars

the boy brings the shovel down

 

until Max’s hind legs stop twitching and his left ear folds into itself,

and the unnamed boy stares at the rabid wolf whose wild eyes loll white in his head,

 

taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels,

for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool,

 

and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels,

again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings

 

singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles

chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices,

 

Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs

of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth

 

slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs

to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy

 

eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick

leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries

 

and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams

that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile,

 

Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk,

in the bowl you made with your own lovely hands.