WEBVTT

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It's called under
the green ceiling.

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Under the green ceiling.

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Two men walk along the
edge of a country road.

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One is joking and
talking about girls

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describing the abrupt curve
from waist to buttocks

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and how it sometimes seems
the whole world lives there.

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As he talks he idly tosses rocks
into the field on his right.

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A field of purple clover
spotted with yellow flowers.

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The rocks clip the
flowers or green

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leaves then disappear
into the darkness beneath.

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It is a cloudless
afternoon in midsummer.

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And in the distance
a green locomotive

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drags a string of red
boxcars toward the horizon.

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The other man has hardly
eaten for two days.

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He is silent and has
almost made up his mind

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that when they reach the
shelter of the woods half a mile

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distance he will
rob his companion.

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We met only that morning.

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He has a knife and
intends only to show it.

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But if the other man
wants to fight, well,

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so much the worse for him.

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And he imagines how the knife
will slide up under the ribs,

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and he'll drag the
body off the road

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and escape over the field
of the railway line.

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So while the one man
talks about girls,

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the other tries
to steal himself.

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I feel hatred for his companion.

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Tries to make them
the focus for all that

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has gone wrong in his life.

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The loss of his job,
desertion of his family.

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Surely the man
talking about girls

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begins to think of his wife we
hasn't seen for nearly a month

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and partly he talks to keep
from thinking about her

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and partly to keep her a
teasing question in his mind,

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will she still love him?

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Has she found someone else?

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He thinks of times
they made love

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when he would sit back on his
haunches straddling her ankles

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and see how her body was
spread out beneath them.

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And as he talks the memory of
his wife naked upon the bed

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fills his mind.

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All the rocks he
tosses into the field

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become the fears of betrayal
and desertion that he one by one

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pushes from him.

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Days later, the other man
is arrested in the city.

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And as he awaits the
slow unfolding of justice

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he tells himself how
foolish his companion had

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been for his constant
talk about girls

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and how he deserved
all that had happened.

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He has no sense of
himself as a fragment.

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He has no sense of how
he and his dead companion

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made up one man.

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Add a third and
he's still one man.

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Add a fourth, likewise.

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But by himself he's a fragment
of wall, part of a broken pot.

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He's like the quivering rodent
under its protection of leaves

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terrified when the chance rock
crashes to its green ceiling

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victim of a world that is
endlessly random and violent.

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