His Bright Withering

You can tell him no but the training wheels on his head spin on, he thinks you don’t mean it, that you don’t mean a thing even when that ‘thing’ is a tense bubble of spitting camels. He just keeps on talking as if you had never said so or he had not glimpsed bared broad yellow teeth. He is an old branch of my tree his teeth clatter as his stiff leaves rattle you into a nervous tick and frozen smile. Yet a part of him is child-like not young but green stemmed and river deep in its sap. When I ply him with wine thinking I might wilt his scratchy chatter he can flick and startle jangled nerves with a pliant and quick stepping wisdom and a spry sly humor, a wit sprung from a well deeper than mine, then I wish I were also that fresh a watering, and not a herder of fractious even-toed ungulates.