Virgola (Comma)
She knows I will wait for her –
(I can’t be sure, she?, he?, but
So she seems to me – )
‘Virgola’, Comma,
Always the last to arrive
At morning tea.
I leave my brew resting on
The white table and move to terrace:
They all know, fluffy and brown-gray,
The family of squirrels living in the trees
And green below, play and play and
Feign and feign and rustle
In the rustling bushes, thick and cool, and
Pines and oaks, twirling
Up opposite trunks, speaking across to themselves
In the way only squirrels do, litigious,
‘You’, ‘you.’
Beneath, solid and sure,
The General dominates the best seat:
Others whittle and wind only on the fringe of
That space he requires, unstirred.
He stands firm and looks up as my hand throws the first nuts –
Peanuts, American Jumbo – to
The overgrown lawn. Away he slides in less than haste,
Picks up the dry fruit and wanders easy,
For a squirrel, to his cement slab throne.
Now the way is clear and others squirrel in
Squirrely, the way only squirrels do,
Jittering and jittering and pausing and moving like mammalian
Butterflies on an earthy breeze, light and maniacal,
Strong fingered strong hands grapping and grabbing and
Holding and crunch-crunch, over here,
‘Over here? Well, then I’m going over there,
So there so there – listen to this: crunch-crunch-nibble.’
The trees look on, delighted, lowering
Only when the breeze picks up, like
Uncle Johns and aunt Sheilas smiling
Into a baby carriage, any bark damage forgotten –
At least at morning tea.
Then she comes, plop-plop, pause,
Plip-plip, pause, plop-
Plop, small and smaller than her sisters and brother,
Exuberance in every plip,
In the space between plops, miserable –
By compare – unfluffy tail trying its best to fluff:
It angles, an unsmooth sharpness, the runt
Sign of runt-ness that, plop-
Plop, pause, plip-plip, pause,
At every jump she forms a laughing comma
Which un-runts her – like me,
She sees me above: ‘You,’ ‘Me’ –
We are a team.
I wait for the place the moment her movement, plip,
Plop: away a three – we both know two will be stolen –
But she will find the one, plip, pause, plop-plop,
Then comma her way up the last tree trunk, a buckeye,
Crunch, crunch, nibble, ‘Don’t mind me. I’m
Way over here.’
The breeze clicks to almost a wind,
Trees sway.
Later the scene will change, plip, plop,
Autumn will come –
But not yet, not yet, plop, pause, pause,
Plip: it’s early summer, heat and ease, waiting
For the next nut, the next comma.
I turn inside to stir my tea.