Black walnuts fall in green rinds that look like little fist-sized fruits, and I’m under the tree picking them off the ground. I have Wordsworth’s poem “The World Is Too Much with Us” playing over in my head, part of it at least. They had us memorize it in high school, and it’s still there rattling around in scraps in my head, broken apart 40 years later, its shards splintering against Keats and Shelley and the rest of the gang. All of them say good things, but what do they know? They’re all so young, all of them but Wordsworth.
He and I are old men, stooping over and plucking nuts from the ground and talking about god and mystery and the pleasure of discovering green nut husks in the weeds behind some guy’s house. One’s rolled under the empty shell of a lawn mower. I want to grab it, but Wordsworth tells me not to. There might be a cotton mouth or rattler under there. Maybe there’s a fox trying to get a nap, and doesn’t he deserve to just lie there in his little fort safe and quiet?
Wordsworth’s right after all. He usually is. He tells me that there are few things as good as a walk. He tells me to look into the sky because today the clouds roil. He tells me to listen, and when I do, I hear the hooves of an Amish man’s horse. The man’s clomping down the road, which surprises Wordsworth, but I tell him that’s the way northern Appalachia works on an Autumn day when you’re out picking up walnuts and getting ready to prep them to dry and then sit until early winter when you’ll grind some and make pudding, and your wife and daughter will tell you that it’s better than it actually is and that it’s special, and that part is true because you harvested these nuts as the leaves fell, and Amish rode by, and you were trying to get that bit about being a pagan right in your head, that bit from his poem. You never did get it right.
He straightens up and waves at the Amish family passing on the road, the horse snorting, and the Amish man lifts a hand and smiles. The Amish man points to a place where a cluster of them have rolled into the curb. I thank him and so does Wordsworth.
In the distance, I can hear men shooting maybe at a turkey, maybe a deer, maybe a target. In the distance, I hear the rain rolling toward us. In the distance, I hear crows arguing with each other, and each sound seems like its own portent right now.
In the distant past I hear myself and all my classmates chanting the poem to prove in class that we’d memorized it. It sounds like the rosary when you’re outside the church, and you can hear people inside praying.
I stop and listen to myself from that long ago moment, and I know that kid knows nothing. He’s far too young. But then so is Keats. So is Shelly. So is Wordsworth. So am I still.
Bio: John Brantingham
