Sustenance in His Countenance

By Matt Miller

You walk into an outside overripe
with summer and there is the gopher,
brown as raw sugar, again camping
out by the compost bin in the backyard
like some fat and greedy grocer,
scanning the coast for cutpurse
clarity, not one ounce of charity
as he nicks and picks tomatoes tops
and carrot lops, all the uneaten beans
and lemons squeezed limp for lemon
water, amid the muck and miasma
of rotting rinds and coffee grinds,
the gopher, a pocket gopher, perched
upon the grass and eating the flower
heads off the white clover. This suburban
mobster, family Geomydae, never
goes against the family, and in fact
he never settles down with a family
and only cozies up during seasons
of breeding then back to the business
of the lonely digger, the larder hoarder,
packing his den with dinners as a dragon
does gold, all against the monster winter,
by filling with food the fur lined pouches
of cheeks that reach from jowl to shoulder,
carrying his sustenance in his countenance.
Noah’s ark was made of gopherwood,
but the word is not related, from the Hebrew
“gofer” a word never used in the Bible
again, a word to the last still teetering atop
Mount Ararat it seems, ready for another
close up, Mr. DeMille. Gophers go back
30 million years, but Creation would
have it that the gopher rode upon Noah’s
wood wondering would his cousin
the woodchuck whittle away the wood
that would whisk him towards new turf
to tunnel because he is built to turn earth
with those mad jacked forequarters and
his clickety clawing front paws. His short
fine fur doesn’t cake amongst the wet and
mud and his tender whiskers, well, they
let him whisk about like a diva in the dark.
Gopher is some say a Muskogean word,
but some say it’s from the French “gaufre”
meaning waffle, waffle because he is awful
skilled at architecting honeycomb patterns
of holes that look like waffles but why not
call the gopher a honeycomb, why not
rayon de miel? Many say the gopher
is a pest. Google gopher and it’s much ado
about his murder. For what if he digs
so many holes, made so many waffles
under your house that some September
Sunday while you are eating homemade
waffles with your family the whole house
falls, waffling into the waffles of tunnels
crushing the gophers lair load of provender
even as you pour syrup and butter onto
your own fodder? But he is a gopher
just being a gopher. So go back inside
and just let the gopher go. For now.