Sling Blade

Yard work, equal sessions reading. Way too much coffee. Swales and swells. Sling blade slices through young green growth. Essays about the circus. Guy at Janitor College, from west Texas, called a thicket a shinnery. Whatever you call it I was in one today, getting a few last morels, don't know how I got in, but when I stood up I was surrounded by canes and vines. Down a north slope, beyond the graveyard, a kind of terrace there that might qualify as a hanging bog. I'd call it one, "a water-saturated terrace located partway up a wooded hillside." Not that I feel bad physically, but all day bothered by the notion of something and therefore set off on the day in an abstract vector. When cutting blackberry canes with a sling blade you must provide a good follow-through and hold the pose at the end of same until the canes fall to earth, if you swing back, as is the tendency, you stand the chance of raking the canes across yourself. I only made the mistake once but managed to scar a cornea, thus the morel hunt. I always carry clippers in the woods, so I managed to get out without tearing clothes. First rattlesnake of the season, coiled in the depression above some Blevins child in the graveyard. I stamp my feet going past him, he was slow and didn't move much, cold last night, reptiles up late, drinking around a bonfire, he seems hungover. Like me, but I'm not, so I cut him some slack, don't kill him and eat him and tan his hide. I hate snakes, I have to admit, not because I'm afraid they'll kill me, but because they have often shocked me, scared-me-in-the-moment, that sudden sinuous movement. I have a history with snakes, anyone who has lived in the woods for decades has a history with snakes, they're part of the landscape, like the fox and the chipmunk. Enough morels for an omelet and creamed on toast. Probably the last. I lick the plate. I like this, the way it plays out, the end game:

Three crows,
nothing unusual,
never mind.