the_look_after

It is work for when they are not home. They are not home and that is just as well because there is work to be done that must be done when they are gone. No one is paying him for results anyway. He looks after the garden that is not a garden and the fruit trees that make little fruit for the forgettable animals and he looks after and he looks out through the rising heat as it warps the work of man in the earth. The hose is black and mouthless, and he stands before it when it does not follow him or it trips on stairs or falls into kink. He looks back and sometimes he kicks it with bent revenge, a choke of his work trapped inside a rubber throat.

He misses the sound.

He brings the hose above his head to the hanging flowers and there is no water for a moment until there is and it pushes out against the sun and falls through the flowers in small trough. Standing against the weight of the rush are several proud tendrils sprouted from the beneath that was once only soil. He lets the water run there for a long while, holding one arm up with the other, moving in a gentle circle around the fist of young plants. The next hanging bunch shows more color and needs less work. He moves quickly past to the next and the next. Back he goes to the first flowers. Water falls through everything and rains from the holes of a hairy coconut shell. He walks to the others briefly and comes back, the hose coiled in debate at his feet. When the rain stops he starts it again.

You watch him in an unseeable labor, and he does not know you are there. You watch him in Canadian sound. The plants have all stopped dripping save one. You want to knock at the glass. You rise without economies and stand in front of him at the window but he does not see you from behind the dripping bush.


a_a