Sean Sexton     Vero Beach            (Rick Campbell)
Revelation and Memory: Winter


I
  
Does the subject run out? Is everything over one day like a war 
one never believed would end, working, living, dying here, where
you’re held in the same confine—with herds of cattle: six hundred
fenced acres, only the weedy, tree-lined hedgerows barely conceal 
your captivity but you’re affixed by land and sky. Clouds gather
from distance by season, weather, and hour, bright, tinted, or dismal. 
At some moment, levity comes to your imagining. Has it not all been 
spoken of at times grandiloquently—to others in name of stewardship,  
or to oneself—wresting away the impulse to harbor regret once again 
in your life. 


We inadvertently turned the cows on the ditchbank this morning, mis-
remembering yet perhaps knowing all the while the left-open gate; 
rushed ahead to bring them back. Only grudgingly did they acquiesce. 
We’re out of grass—need somewhere to go—maybe this always inmost 
to us. We’re essentially poor—our circumstances small and never been 
otherwise—bringing three hundred cows and their calves along in certain 
poverty, presently fashioned upon a season that equals the stupidity of man.


                  II


I remember Tampa one February, stiff wind skirling off the Bay, ravaging
the State Fairgrounds. Everyone in down vests, freezing their asses off, 
ducking into the main pavilion to get out of it for a moment—that tense, 
quiet, concentrated air of the livestock show, class after class sequencing 
hours. Then back out into that gale where speech itself—frozen—doesn’t 
quite catch in the ear amid wind-torn diesel clatter of the midway mixing 
with aromas of candy and grease.


The Brahman Association meeting was kept till after the final class: “Get 
of Sire”—whole cow families lined up—bull, dam, yearlings, and sucklings, 
together like entries on a pedigree certificate as in proof of something. 
The handlers, mostly farm-raised kids, lead ropes and show sticks, feverishly
stroking dewlaps and navels—all watching as they cow-towed determinedly
the circulating, dispassionate judge.


Old Boss walked the midway hunting for a vendor to sell us Cuban sandwiches 
he remembered from years ago at the fair. Yet only funnel cakes, colored ices 
of every radioactive hue, gewgaws, and worthless ephemera to be found. This 
is the outer pocket emptying world we pass through, coming to understand 
the invernal chill of Hell—not Dante’s—nor from sudden loss and derision, 
but the unnamable thing that can spawn and grow within your life—malevolent 
cousin of hope—like a weak calf  born every year and for whatever reason, 
sickens and dies on your watch.


III


We conceded to hamburgers the elephant stepped on at a stand, and joined 
the meeting destined to mire in pettiness--formality: the thinking-man’s 
whore. President, Joe Barthle at last interrupted the hour’s long inanity
to say, “Gentlemen—what’s your pleasure?” Old Boss had had enough, 
whispered audibly, “Let’s bug out of here!” and up and gone, we were soon 
crossing along dusk-laden strawberry fields of Valrico and Dover, obliterating
massifs of phosphate at Mulberry, Bartow’s reclamations and equipment yards 
and the brown, frozen expanses of prairie between podunk boiled-peanut  
and fruit-stand settlements along the way.


The Kissimmee was somnolent, hyacinthine from the bridge; Blanket Bay, 
Peavine Trail, the Desert Inn at the crossroads, Ossawa, cut-off to Blue Cypress 
and Twenty-mile Bend all dissolved into a gloaming folded upon memory. 
How many times this trip taken before and since in my life’s journey, soon melded
into the days til conjuring comes from a westward glance to coloring finale or this 
sullen evening as the chime rings a brisk air, seeming to possess the world’s breath. 
There will be no last glimpse of the orb, no crack in the western firmament where 
light has already begun to slip out of the sky into oncoming darkness.​
​