The Parable of the Sower
Two trees with bad roots
Planted by Lamont, dead six years now
He’d have replaced them had we told him
But we watched each stunt in their individual ways
waiting for them to figure it out
We couldn’t know that
they didn’t have means
This morning I cut them down
17 years of trying
Just a quick crescendo of throttle
And they fell to bounce softly on their boughs
the way that evergreens do,
pine cones like little bells
on the ground
We built this house at the turn of the Century
when we were thirty,
and had been poor long enough
to dare to believe ourselves rich
Before we arrived
the neighbors courted in our woods,
walking deer trails yet unbroken by a house
For a while they told us that story every time they saw us
Now they’re moved away and we tell the story
The turn of the Century seems a ridiculous thing to remember.
100 years, a random unit
to house our lives, most of which
are spent outside trespassing
undeveloped romance,
swinging hands
with a husband’s conceit
Local
I’d never seen anyone outside of that house,
just a dirty four wheeler parked by the sagging porch,
an old dishwasher next to a rotting doghouse.
I’d made assumptions about the occupants
as some of us do, remembering.
As we walked past
a young girl appeared at the top of the drive
holding out her hand to the dog,
dressed in the gear
of the local high school track team.
The kind of kid
who wears their good grades and quiet potential
the way that others wear punk or goth or stoner.
You’ve made a friend, I said to the dog,
who was licking her hand.
Have a good walk, she said,
after a time, standing
and set off up the road at a slow jog,
the kind that is taught
to be paced and certain
to get you where you are going
cross country from your start.
Ferret Man
Stained undershirt, gray whiskered, a bulk staring inquisitively through the screen into the October leaf swirl at my daughter on the porch Trick or Treating.
Oh, he said. Hang on.
Rummaged around the house for candy.
Most of the mountain kids gone to town for trunk or treat,
not fulfilling their father’s idea of what will make the better memory: dirt roads, cloud scudded blue dark, everything creepy, winter breathing hot on the truck windows house to house.
Moon glint from a rusty piece of well casing half buried in the yard, and a triumphant return.
Holding a crumpled Snickers bar.
My emergency stash, he said.
He reached suddenly to pick up two ferrets, draping them around his neck side to side. The white-blue poltergeist of a TV shone in their thin, bristly fur. My daughter took a step back. Don’t want them to get out, he said.
He cracked the door to the smell of weasel, decades of house. Dropped the candy into her bag. Thank you, she said.
Sure, he said, as if to another adult and closed the door.
We saw him every Halloween thereafter, but never outside of the holiday or his house.
Ferret Man.
We added him to the oddities of the season.
His car, an old painter’s van, topped with bird shit splattered wooden ladders, covered in road dust, listing on dry rotted tires, maintained his presence
until last month, when several strange cars and trucks appeared in his driveway. A few days later the contents of the house began to appear on the yard.
This is how it goes around here when someone dies: heirs arrive, usually from out of state, throw open the windows and eject their agoraphobic relative outside in a pile of stained and broken tubs, accessible toilet seats, mildewed mattresses, and ferret cages: a vomited miasma of unkempt promise that reaches out while you drive by
despite the Lysol and fresh air, the orbital sanders and paint, to touch you
with the terrible hesitancy that haunts us.
*
Learn more about Matt on our Contributors’ Page.
Matt’s latest collection, Disappearing by the Math, was published in 2023 by Silver Bow Publishing in 2024 and is available here.
(Photo: Deviations with Ray/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- The Parable of the Sower and Other Poems by Matt Thomas - October 31, 2024