Vignette (in five minutes).
Young Alan imagined then that each granular clod he picked from within his bowled hand correlated to a bolus of rage within his heart globules of souring food within the gizzard of his bird body his digits grinding back and forth as he made dust of them Within thine own bud buriest thy content / And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding the phrases he had spoken to himself and trundled in his chest came pouring into the dry canals of his ears and stinging eyes the tiny book which he had read appearing fully articulated in the supple mound of loam under which lay the dog a sagging sack of velveteen dust he had cried into and oh now the final lines making it clear though he knew not what each phrase truly meant elucidated by sound and noun each alone Pity the world, or else this glutton be, / To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee. Alone at the grave of the dog he felt the word churl lapping at a delicate nerve and began again to cry when in repetition his father came outside and stared into him as a mill worker might stare hollowly into the fiery forge painted in an expression both mundane and replete with agony-angry as a titan the man threw his bottle against a tree where it shattered raining for a few sunlit moments glorious bits of glass and the birds piqued and chirping in fright as prismatic flakes puffed out into a strange cloud and quickly fell to the earth below them, such an odd moment came into being then that Alan was taken from himself-feeling at once angry frightened mournful and assailed by natural beauty; the birds sang in stutters of trills and the grass below waved in tender breath each thing and each part aglow in the humming warmth of the sunlight the air itself yet chilled and charged with the fresh bite of cold teeth the ground hard atop and wet beneath the land spread with autumn leaves whose dry audible crinkling was undiminished by their wet backs covered now and then in loitering caterpillars who wriggled and seemed to stare back at you in sated and yawning wonder, the dog was buried and his tears had been shed, his face was salted and tightened from the eyes, his arms were aching and his legs unstretched as he moved across the lawn toward the tree skirted in breathable glass, into the day, into the warm and unapologetic light, then into the shade where once again he would fell himself and contemplate the confusion of chords in his justborn world.