Poem for Wednesday and County Fair Tortoises

Tortoise
By Michael Cadnum

The only wild creature that ever
visited was the tortoise,
a living helmet that would be
crossing the heat-reflecting gravel again
suddenly after years of being gone,
a face that flinched in and then way in only
to slouch out again with its
china-crack mouth, and an eye
surrounded with oak-bark,
a pupil dark and without spark,
on a neck sheathed with ancient rubber.

And legs that swam, lurching strokes
stubbornly midair, tensile enough to lift
his entire chassis off the sidewalk
and lever his shadow ahead,
and strong enough to painfully claw
if we held him too close, on his way,
in the living room, on his
way turned any direction—

pointed at an offering of torn
lettuce, into that leaf, deeply even

angrily into the scattered green gift
set into the middle of the street,
a game we never
played for long because
the bronze puzzle-pieces
of his armor and his nothing-to-do-
with-us determination were already
done with our lives and he was
across the manhole cover, up the curb,
across the sun made of stone.

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My Wednesday started with a lovely conversation with my three good high school friends on Zoom, then the handyman came and fixed the shelf in our closet, yay! The rest of the day was mostly about chores -- we had two boxes of stuff still unsorted from moving that we wanted to get out of the second bedroom before niece arrives on Friday, so now it has all been sorted and either shelved, put in bags for the kids, or taken to our storage unit (mostly the latter, since a lot of it was toys from older son's bedroom). 

After going to the storage unit to drop off the box and pick up a couple of framed things we wanted to hang on the walls, we stopped at Safeway for necessities. Then we came home to watch Secret Invasion with Cheryl (oh, Nick Fury, you fool), and now we're watching The King's Daughter, which is very silly but very pretty, filmed at Versailles and on a ship in Melbourne. The county fair had a reptile show last weekend and though we couldn't work out the timing to see it, we did get to visit the tortoises: