Modern Husbandry
There are some things I have given up on
I scratch with my rake across the back patio, not bored but skittishly distracted, as if my gaze, in resting on something other than the task at hand, would push away my concentration forever, leaving the task half-done or done badly, which is inevitable or at least seems inevitable (operationally the same thing) whenever I take up any kind of manual labor. The plastic tines of the rake scratch themselves down against the cement, itself abrading, flaking off in shallow chips, along with the caked mud held fast by a dry and warm October. The collected vegetation gets stuffed into heavy contractor bags. A barnyard odor fills the air, as I pack down the loose the vines and leaves, these also desiccated by the sun, not a barnyard odor, perhaps, but something more industrial, the odor of a feedlot, a feedlot for cattle bred preposterously fat and immobile, pliant for my (insufficiently realized) purposes. My cattle—they’re mine, I guess, I’m responsible for them—my cattle have no legs, have no arms, have no eyes or nose; their immense mouths flap jawless, without muscle or sinew. They rest against each other, in the heat of the afternoon and the cool of the evening, waiting for the day (the day is Thursday) when I’ll finally dispose of them. They lack proper hearing, that sense replaced by felt vibrations through the ground. They can perceive my rake as it scratches along, but I hear it as a kind of ragged inhalation and exhalation, a back and forth that abrades my concentration even as it demands it—the simplest task demands a certain amount of concentration—a back and forth which might be arrested at any moment, for any reason, by something overhead, by arcs of condensation, building cloud, as the day lays down bedding for itself, restful, having succeeded (unlike me) by simply elapsing, in doing what it set out to do.
