August 2020
Michael Gessner
mjcg3@aol.com
Bio Note: At the moment, I'm taking notes along with sections of rough draft for a long piece of fiction set in cotton country during, what else, but a pandemic.

It's one of those narratives that has been developing over the years. In fact, my earliest notes date from 1992! So you can see the rate of my writing!

But like so many of my writing projects, this has 'incubated' so that now it's tumbling out in sections and they seemed to have linked up somewhere along the way so that the story is nearly telling itself, although it still requires much time and attention. We've just returned from visiting my son and his girlfriend in Laguna Beach and that was a pleasant trip. I often think about Firestone and what an exemplary person he continues to be in my memory.

The Setter and the Geranium

Before sunup my father would load
his car, his dog, his gun
and head up north with his boy
to hunt pheasants in Michigan’s thumb.
 
By midnight we’d be home again
and in the basement combed thistles
and thorns from the dog’s amber coat,
while the setter kept one eye on the birds
 
who could no longer fly anywhere
and still were his single fascination, 
even when gutted on the boards,
and last, we’d clean the guns,
 
the barrels with patches, the stocks
with linseed and lemon oil.  We did this
every fall, until birds were not all
I learned to kill.  In the spring, my father
 
nursed a giant geranium, the largest 
on the block, with those same hands,
and neighbors when they walked by
so admired that bursting red plant.
©2020 Michael Gessner
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