Something was left behind and then forgotten about. A nail rotting deep down under the soil next to animal bones, poisoning the earthworms. You feel like you’re going crazy because you swear to God you can taste it in the wild strawberries, smell it in the magnolia flowers, just at the knife’s edge of what you can sense, right before it bends off into fuzz and nothing. Rusted so that its definitions are shaky, bloated like a corpse, like dead metal can be. I need ninety thousand hours of conversations on tape. I need to fill notebooks and scrawl all over walls and I need to chart the patterns. Something is here, already here. Been here for a long time. Finding it is a matter of patience. There are things that we want to blurt out and we ought not to, we want to jump to conclusions. Hold your tongue boy. We ought to deliberate. Hold that thought, hold it, close your eyes and turn it over and over and over in your fingers, turn until your wrists are numb. Your devil wants you singing, wants that chain flying out of your mouth so fast you don’t even see the knot beating up your throat. Hold your tongue, boy. Run your hands along that rusted old thing, find where it went bad. Find the snarl and grab it tight and before you move your tongue you better know your wound, better than you know the dirt under your fingernails, better than a mother knows her child.