It's called under the green ceiling.
Under the green ceiling.
Two men walk along the edge of a country road.
One is joking and talking about girls
describing the abrupt curve from waist to buttocks
and how it sometimes seems the whole world lives there.
As he talks he idly tosses rocks into the field on his right.
A field of purple clover spotted with yellow flowers.
The rocks clip the flowers or green
leaves then disappear into the darkness beneath.
It is a cloudless afternoon in midsummer.
And in the distance a green locomotive
drags a string of red boxcars toward the horizon.
The other man has hardly eaten for two days.
He is silent and has almost made up his mind
that when they reach the shelter of the woods half a mile
distance he will rob his companion.
We met only that morning.
He has a knife and intends only to show it.
But if the other man wants to fight, well,
so much the worse for him.
And he imagines how the knife will slide up under the ribs,
and he'll drag the body off the road
and escape over the field of the railway line.
So while the one man talks about girls,
the other tries to steal himself.
I feel hatred for his companion.
Tries to make them the focus for all that
has gone wrong in his life.
The loss of his job, desertion of his family.
Surely the man talking about girls
begins to think of his wife we hasn't seen for nearly a month
and partly he talks to keep from thinking about her
and partly to keep her a teasing question in his mind,
will she still love him?
Has she found someone else?
He thinks of times they made love
when he would sit back on his haunches straddling her ankles
and see how her body was spread out beneath them.
And as he talks the memory of his wife naked upon the bed
fills his mind.
All the rocks he tosses into the field
become the fears of betrayal and desertion that he one by one
pushes from him.
Days later, the other man is arrested in the city.
And as he awaits the slow unfolding of justice
he tells himself how foolish his companion had
been for his constant talk about girls
and how he deserved all that had happened.
He has no sense of himself as a fragment.
He has no sense of how he and his dead companion
made up one man.
Add a third and he's still one man.
Add a fourth, likewise.
But by himself he's a fragment of wall, part of a broken pot.
He's like the quivering rodent under its protection of leaves
terrified when the chance rock crashes to its green ceiling
victim of a world that is endlessly random and violent.