Cutting Back Brush

by Gordon Johnston

Cutting back brush at our lot’s wild edge last summer,

I seized a sapling that stabbed deep into the heel of my palm

through heavy glove-leather to break and lodge inside me.

My own grip did it—my own muscle closing on the thorn,

then releasing it as the pain pierced my left hand, pinned

like a snake doctor in a collector’s bug box. Trying to let go

drew the curved black barb so far into the meat of me that

I could only feel it. I didn’t bleed and yet for weeks to take up

with that weaker hand—soup pot, ball glove, handlebar of bike,

canoe paddle, even the hand of another—hurt. Some deep bone

must have bruised. My bilateral body went mono in the way

it moved: the right side took on every small task so the left

could heal, but that opposable brother only softened and seared 

worse. To touch my son’s shoulder, steer my truck, and hold the silk hip 

of my wife at a wedding dance drove a glass needle into a nerve. 

It ached to swim. If as a child you hid splinters from your father’s 

digging tweezers and the point of his knife, you know how this goes: 

like yours, my thorn slowly rose, a faint, penciled comma one shade 

darker day by day until, this morning, wincing as I cupped the water 

to rinse my face, my pain was written in pen. I could read it 

as if through the wrong side of a page. Like the black back of a minnow 

that a welling pool brings to its surface, the brier let itself rise. 

My skin rippled. I reached through with a straight pin to spear weeks of hurt. 

A new pain gripped my hand—sharp, clean, a single bead of blood— 

the ache of healing where the buried wound had been.