Ann Fisher-Wirth

Today

Make it of this, of this, of this
—William Carlos Williams

Today I walked in the sun
and picked up pecans still falling from the trees,

even the ones on the muddy sidewalk.
Then we drove them, three grocery bags full,

to the Feed & Seed Store in Batesville, where a little
rat terrier for sale whimpered in a crate

(please God let somebody buy it) and the taciturn man
whose khaki shirt didn’t meet across his stomach

poured my 35 pounds of pecans into their clackety-
clack machine that breaks the shells  

and the blower that mostly blows the shells off.
We drove home along Highway 6, past the empty

concrete building that was once the Cedar Bucket,
which made picnic tables and Adirondack chairs, 

past the billboard for a bucktoothed
bankruptcy lawyer named Ronnie, past the golden

mansion built by the owner of El Charro, with its lake
and an entrance gate flanked by two enormous 

rampant metal stallions, past the fenced hill 
where John Grisham built his own Little League

diamond and lived with his family until the tour buses
came and people started getting married in their yard. 

As we drove home through the sunlight, past the Nissan
dealership and the Toyota dealership and the Ford

dealership, past all the sprawl, off the highway,
down Jackson, my love’s hand on my thigh, 

on an ordinary north Mississippi afternoon,
I thought, Who could deserve this happiness?

Back to Issue XII…