Another Afternoon in a Rural Half Acre
by Terry Trowbridge

 
I smell like sweat and walnut sap.
This is the fourth bucket of walnuts I have collected today
from my family’s backyard.
This is for the food bank and the tax receipts
that make the sweat worthwhile.
We split the tree loot with the squirrels
who care nothing for tax returns.
They prefer traditional saving strategies.

Walnuts, still in the green,
might go squishy or might dry out.
One for the squirrels, one for the pauper,
only touch can tell.
When strangers from a local subdivision bicycle past,
I can hold a squishy one between thumb and finger: CRACK
I look so phenomenally buff to the suburbanites.

To peel away the green, soak them in a bucket for a week.
Worms will appear. Flies.
Food is medieval. Food will always be full of allegory,
spontaneous generation, conversions,
the process to nutrition identical with the process to contamination.

Death, cloaked, also kneels and looks into the buckets.
Death peers at a maggot, held up on a finger bone.
White segments inch along a white segment.
So what? Death and I are both saying,
our tones of voice implying opposite meanings.

I strain last week’s walnuts.
The air smells of walnut sap.
My fingers are stained.
My shirt is stained.
The mixture stains wood: furniture, fittings, fabrics.
The hard shells impenetrably clack together.
I try to remember where I read walnuts contain chemistries 
that improve neurons and cell cohesion;
and wonder if that means walnuts protect against the ill-health of poverty.
Or perhaps the ill-health of commuter highway traffic sprawl?

The walnut trees shade me but I still smell like sweat and sap,
here in the lush respiring photosynthesis.
I am unemployed and have no income
while my family members work or draw pensions.
The squirrels have the advantage of altitude
while I spend an afternoon weighing fruit for family tax receipts.