Once We Were White In Each Direction.

        -Chad Vogler

1.

The light increase after cutting concentrates the existing woodland-floor vegetation: bluebell, anemone, primrose. For centuries, the former had been synonymous with education. When the topic of cordwood was breached, the ensuing comparisons of coastal sequoias with the dictionary required complementary neologisms for representations of “a coppice with standards.” Strange to watch him whipped by anyone but his father. We were learning predicates primarily by emulating the textual examples. Environment included the atmosphere. They seemed connected. My best friend played Bust a Move from a cassette taken from his older sister on the class radio a few years before her boyfriend’s murder. I noticed everyone’s going out. We all felt grateful to be home.

3.

It’s hard to believe, but I shot an arrow straight into the air and all at once, immediately, forgot about it, took a dozen steps or so before I remembered and stood still. Bluebell, anemone, primrose; a composition dense with ferns. Blue, green, polka dots, as if anyone were ever. A stupid and gross exaggeration. A man called Bones sometimes brought Gabe to the house on the back of his motorcycle; it is a black and white memory in which I am still not sure of its color. It makes a difference a gist memory. That type of resistance was completely acceptable in the years following the famous student suicide, and I already had a file. Blame industry and “a coppice with standards.” As similar to swearing, one could say, as a subcategory of slang. It was the right time to say fuck with everything.

4.

A neglected sweet beechwood may or may not be overstood. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered in the church only the most vapid children of my class following my sudden interest. The ice was thick enough that you could not only walk on it, but you could practically build your summer home there. The flesh colored tile patterns resembling plant cells into which my sisters matched their toes before the floors were carpeted. All I understood of his suicide I read in the newspaper years later. This would have happened when we were older, which compromises the arrangement. A dense composition of ferns, the wild tiger lilies lining the ditches until the township came to cut them, and hearing the truck’s diesel engine the children ran waving their arms out the front door. At the end of the road the signs are all blowing away. As they are swept up at gas stations, the annual mayflies are the amusement park version of locusts. It is supposed to become a part of the new subdivision.