Aenon Church Road

Guy I know met his goal at Weight Watchers,
so he goes to the Winn Dixie and gets
those Danish butter cookies that come in the blue tin,
and he drives out of town, all the way to Aenon Church Road,
and he parks his car in the most deserted spot he can find
and gets out and opens the cookie tin
and takes out all the cookies in their little white wrappers
and lines them up on the roof of his car in the order
he wants to eat them in, and they’re really the same cookie
over and over again, crisp and yellow-brown and sugar-studded,
though the shapes are different,
and that’s the part he wants to get right
so he’ll eat the right cookies first and then the others
and finish with the cookies you’d finish with
if you, too, were happy that you’d met your Weight Watchers goal
and are standing by your car with all these cookies spread out
across its roof on a beautiful moonlit night
on Aenon Church Road.

                                        Out the cookies come, then,
the circles, then the squares, the ovals, the rings.
And he picks a cookie with the most alluring
shape of all, a twist that goes all the way around
so you can’t tell where it begins or ends
the way our lives do, like time, like pleasure itself,
and he takes it out of its wrapper and looks at it
for a minute and closes his eyes and breathes in and out
and puts the cookie on his tongue,
and that’s when he feels the hand on his shoulder.

The rents are cheap on Aenon Church Road,
and the people who live in its shacks and trailers
are artists and criminals and preachers
and sometimes all three. Aenon Church Road
is where you go when you’re up to something,
and that’s why the deputy has parked his car there, too,
and crept up on the guy silently in case he’s armed
or plans to flee. The deputy’s never seen anything like this.
Everything has to make sense to the deputy.
Not to us, though. Everything doesn’t have to make sense
to us as long as most things do.

The deputy wants the facts, all of them.
But that’s his job, not ours. So start your car, reader.
Buy your cookies. Drive out to Aenon Church Road
and line the cookies up on your car’s roof
and begin to eat them, and not too quickly.
Savor each one. But don’t hesitate, either.
There’s a deputy in the shadows.
There’s always a deputy in the shadows.
He’s not a bad guy. He just wants to understand.
That’s why he’s dangerous.