Day 1

The ginger farmer unlaces his boots,
peels away his socks,
and tosses them in the bed of his truck.
Fidgeting down the gravel road,
one sock falls out.
When the farmer reaches pavement,
he stops to unlock the wheel hubs
and raise the forgotten tailgate
but doesn’t count socks until
he’s home. Dollar a dozen, says his wife,
Wal-Mart.

Week 2

A white thing in the road, soon gray,
flattened daily by tires. A woman who walks
watches it. She’s the one to notice
it’s inside out, how the rain comes through
either way. No question it’s a sock,
every day a larger size,
elastic breaking down.

Roads collect things—one sock,
a sandwich-size Ziploc on a grass shoulder,
a fallen No Trespassing sign—the woman
tosses it—
silver wing glint—into the meadow,
a warning to the next man
who plows ground.

Month 3

Like a rock, the sock has made its bed
in the road. Short threads curl like hair, trucks and rain
paint and unpaint and repaint, like Giacometti
trying to fashion what his eyes see.
Earth turns the sock to earth,
thread by cotton thread, unravels
the blind, heeled sheath, machine-knitted
in Mindanao, towed on a barge to Hilo, chosen
by a wife, lost
for a walking woman to watch—
the sock enters history when she writes it down.

Year 4

Look into the future, where
the woman remembers the sock.
Where was it exactly? Past Doug’s driveway
but before the goat pens, near this gatepost
or that flat stone.
Many rocks have shifted,
washed into the field,
some may be hiding. How many parts
to a sock and do they divide
cleanly? Toe from heel or thread by thread?

Decade 5

The woman has gone where the sock went.

History can’t find the poem.

Carol Peters is a student of fiction in the MFA Creative Writing program at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. Recent work has been published in Inkburns, The God Particle, and The Song of the Leimaker. She lives on a small coffee farm on the Big Island of Hawaii and writes to the sound of ducks quacking. Her current project is a novel of unsavory domestic life.

These pieces were first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.

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