No Valediction

I want to uncurve us from the bedpost's polished
glass and cannot. We stay there, flailing just
beneath the surface of the light we darken
with dark eyes and our bodies using the light
to flail. The bedroom window is all sky.
If I could fill it with you, I'd be alone.

In the mornings, I remember less than ever.
The days lie straight out of the room and only
begin to curve hours later, turning away
from every surface polished enough to catch light
or the two of us as we still are.
If this goes on for long, I will always love you.

~Donald Revell                                                                              

No Children, No Pets

I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s
in a running-shoe box held shut
with elastic bands. Then I clean
the corners where she has eaten and
slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food
from the baseboard, dumping the litter
and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic
dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-
soaked towel I put in the trash. I put
the catnip mouse in the box and I put
the box away, too, in a deep
dirt drawer in the earth.

When the death-energy leaves me,
I go to the room where my daughter slept
in nursery school, grammar school, high school,
I lie on her milky bedspread and think
of the day I left her at college, how nothing
could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax
out from between her floorboards,
or taking a razor blade to the decal
that said to the firemen, “Break
this window first.” I close my eyes now
and enter a place that’s clearly
expecting me, swaddled in loss
and then losing that, too, as I move
from room to bone-white room
in the house of the rest of my life.

~Sue Ellen Thompson                                                                                                      

Rite of Passage

As the guests arrive at our son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

~Sharon Olds                                                                                               

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

~Margaret Atwood                                                                          

Letter to the Local Police

Dear Sirs:

I have been enjoying the law and order of our
community throughout the past three months since
my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous
photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to
our previous neighbors (with whom we were very
close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly
prospering under your custody

Indeed, until yesterday afternoon and despite my
vigilant casting about, I have been unable to discover
a single instance of reasons for public-spirited concern,
much less complaint

You may easily appreciate, then, how it is that
I write to your office, at this date, with utmost
regret for the lamentable circumstances that force
my hand

Speaking directly to the issue of the moment:

I have encountered a regular profusion of certain
unidentified roses, growing to no discernible purpose,
and according to no perceptible control, approximately
one quarter mile west of the Northway, on the southern
side

To be specific, there are practically thousands of
the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot
of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only
the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting
of promiscuous cross-fertilization

As I say, these roses, no matter what the apparent
background, training, tropistic tendencies, age,
or color, do not demonstrate the least inclination
toward categorization, specified allegiance, resolute
preference, consideration of the needs of others, or
any other minimal traits of decency

May I point out that I did not assiduously seek out
this colony, as it were, and that these certain
unidentified roses remain open to viewing even by
children, with or without suitable supervision

(My wife asks me to append a note as regards the
seasonal but nevertheless seriously licentious
phenomenon of honeysuckle under the moon that one may
apprehend at the corner of Nelson and Main

However, I have recommended that she undertake direct
correspondence with you, as regards this: yet
another civic disturbance in our midst)

I am confident that you will devise and pursue
appropriate legal response to the roses in question
If I may aid your efforts in this respect, please
do not hesitate to call me into consultation

                                 Respectfully yours,

~June Jordan                                                                                

In Celebration

You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling
the old self become the older self, imagining
only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.
You think that silence is the extra page,
you think that nothing is good or bad, not even
the darkness that fills the house while you sit watching
it happen. You’ve seen it happen before. Your friends
move past the window, their faces soiled with regret.
You want to wave but cannot raise your hand.
You sit in a chair. You turn to the nightshade spreading
a poisonous net around the house. You taste
the honey of absence. It is the same wherever
you are, the same if the voice rots before
the body, or the body rots before the voice.
You know that desire leads only to sorrow, that sorrow
leads to achievement which leads to emptiness.
You know that this is different, that this
is the celebration, the only celebration,
that by giving yourself over to nothing,
you shall be healed. You know there is joy in feeling
your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen future,
so you wait, you stare and you wait, and the dust settles
and the miraculous hours of childhood wander in darkness.

~Mark Strand                                                              

Poem (To be read with Philip Glass's String Quartet No. 5)

Inside the bell jar of the glass factory,
the girls bend over conveyor belts, lean
into kilns, bobbing like birds diving for fish.
One taps a finished porthole window
with a small silver hammer and
pronounces it sound (outside
a woodpecker smashes its beak
into a whitebirch, searching for sap).
One girl runs her finger down the seam
of a serving plate (outside floodwater
makes a mirror of the meadow).
Another girl holds a thermometer
up to the light (the sun has inched up
a few degrees and yes, Monday has a fever).
Another dips her finger into
a beaker of water and tests
that each goblet in the set sings
a successive note in an E minor scale—
six notes the other girls know so well
that at night, in the dormitory,
one or all of them can be heard
hum-dreaming the song in their sleep.

Since they’re not allowed outside—
never have been, never will be—
they used to watch rainstorms
like television, cross-legged, wiping
the glass if their breath fogged
the view. They used to exclaim
over drops of dew. They used to
run their fingers along the walls,
searching for a way out, but that only
smeared the sky. At break they lie
on their stomachs in the sunroom,
where they’ve stacked a wall of cracked
glass hands. Looking through it is the closest
they come to touching the things they see—
the horizon a lifeline across one palm,
the pine trees in the distance like
bonsai in tiny finger terrariums.
Moving things—foxes and half-moons—
slink in and out of adjacent wrists,
slide under successive glass fingernails.
Once a stag walked past and scraped
its antlers along the glass wall.
They all gasped. It was the closest
they had ever come to another body.

Now as if their skull walls had
windows and each brain were
a clear, crystalline thing, the synapses
making temporary chandeliers
of thought-sparks in the brain’s
blank sky, they are all having
the same idea at the same time—
to make a girl out of glass.
The sketches start out simple, but soon
one girl proposes a glass voicebox
strung with glass chimes, another petitions
for porthole pupils, a fringe of glass
lashes on each eyelid’s hinge, another
imagines a mouth made of powdered
glass and crinkle enamel, and off they go.
Not one finger here has ever felt fur,
seen veins or bones except under
the cover of skin, but they bypass
all that with the force of their dreaming—
how best to make her glass hair seem to
stream down her back, whose forefinger
they should choose to dent in her dimples.

The thermometer hits one thousand
degrees and suddenly she’s standing there—
hot, glowing, almost still liquid. Like them,
but unlike too. They don’t question that
she is alive, walking, gesturing. But no one
imagined that she, with her new glass eyes
would be able to see the glass lock
and the glass key. In an instant, she opens
the door and they stream outside into
the solid world. This isn’t at all what
they imagined. The sky is like lead
above their heads. The once-silent birds
flood their ears with clashing arias.
All the puddles on the path are blurred
with mud. The glass girl disappears
and they don’t go after her. When they finally
reach the forest—it is miles further
than they imagined—the air inside is hazy
with dust and spores. They can’t see much
beyond their fingers. A bear or maybe
a deer thuds by. When they come upon
a stream, for a moment they brighten:
the light prances on its surface like the prisms
they make in the factory, but they can’t
see through to the fish, or the shadows
of fish flitting along the river floor.

Weeks later, they are back in the factory,
busily pouring bright liquids from
one beaker to another, sliding barefoot
between kiln, conveyor belt, workshop.
Then sleep. In her dreams, the girl who
has begun building a glass owl
from the inside-out, starting with
its morning meal of mouse, will invent
a formula for flight. Another is designing
a glass ladder where each rung has
a different horizon hidden inside.
The glass girl could be anywhere.
She could be just outside, watching
or she could be worlds away, and truly,
they like it that way. In the hot afternoon,
the girls melt into various poses by
the glass walls, molding their memories
of the outside world into newer, clearer forms.
One taps a finished porthole window
with a small silver hammer and pronounces it
sound. One runs her finger down the seam
of a serving plate. Another holds a thermometer
horizontally, and uses its markings to measure
the height of the trees. The mercury inside
shivers in the newly imagined breeze.

~Matthea Harvey                                                                                  

when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story

—And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday—
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come—
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies—
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other—
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well.

~Gwendolyn Brooks                                                    

The Use of Poetry

On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California,
having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot
to “go with a guy” in a green truck,
and all Christmas Day volunteers searched for her body within a fifteen-mile radius,
and her father and grandfather searched
and spoke to reporters because TV coverage
might help them find her if she were still alive,
and her mother stayed home with the telephone,
not appearing in public, and I could imagine
this family deciding together this division of labor
and what little else they could do to do something,
and the kitchen they sat in, the tones they spoke in,
who cried and who didn’t, and how they comforted one another
with words of hope and strokings of backs and necks,
but I couldn’t imagine their fear that their daughter
had been murdered in the woods, raped no doubt,
tied up, chopped up, God knows what else,
or them picturing her terror as it was happening to her
or their own terror of her absence ever after,
cut off from them before she had a chance to grow through adolescence,
her room ever the same with its stupid posters of rock stars
until they can bear to take them down
because they can’t bear to leave them up anymore—
on this day, which happened to be Christmas,
at the kind of holiday gathering with a whole turkey and spiral-cut ham
and beautiful dishes our hosts spent their money and time making
to cheer their friends and enjoy the pleasure of giving,
in a living room sparkling with scented candles and bunting
and a ten-foot tree adorned with antique ornaments,
the girl’s disappearance kept surfacing in conversations across the room
while I was being cornered by a man who said his wife was leaving him
after twenty-one years of marriage, then recited his résumé
as if this couldn’t happen to someone with his business acumen;
and it did again after I excused myself to refill my punch glass
when someone at the punch bowl said what she had heard about it from someone else
who had played tennis that morning with the girl’s mother’s doubles partner,
while I filled a punch glass for somebody’s dad
brought along so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas,
a man in his eighties with a face like a raven’s,
his body stooped, ravaged by age and diseases,
who told me he was amazed to still be alive himself
after a year in which he had lost both his wife and son,
then, to my amazement, began telling me how important
he is in his business world
just like the man I had just gotten away from,
that he’s still a player in international steel
involved in top-drawer projects for the navy,
and I was selfish enough to be selfless enough
to draw him out a little, and the younger man, too
(who appeared at my elbow again and started talking again),
but not selfless enough to feel what they each were going through
because my own fear and hunger
cloud how I imagine everyone,
including the bereaved family of the missing girl
and the girl herself, and certainly her murderer,
although I know what it is to hate yourself completely
and believe all human community is lies and bullshit
and what happens to other people doesn’t matter.

~Michael Ryan                                                         

Mothers

the last time i was home
to see my mother we kissed
exchanged pleasantries
and unpleasantries pulled a warm
comforting silence around
us and read separate books

i remember the first time
i consciously saw her
we were living in a three room
apartment on burns avenue

mommy always sat in the dark
i don’t know how i knew that but she did

that night i stumbled into the kitchen
maybe because i’ve always been
a night person or perhaps because i had wet
the bed
she was sitting on a chair
the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through
those thousands of panes landlords who rented
to people with children were prone to put in windows
she may have been smoking but maybe not
her hair was three-quarters her height
which made me a strong believer in the samson myth
and very black

i’m sure i just hung there by the door
i remember thinking: what a beautiful lady

she was very deliberately waiting
perhaps for my father to come home
from his night job or maybe for a dream
that had promised to come by
“come here” she said “i’ll teach you
a poem: i see the moon
               the moon sees me
               god bless the moon
               and god bless me”
i taught it to my son
who recited it for her
just to say we must learn
to bear the pleasures
as we have borne the pains

~Nikki Giovanni                                                                                                      

Ideas

I was the lonely one in whom   

they swarmed in the millions.   

I was their creature and I   

was grateful. I could sleep   

when I wanted.

I lived a divided   

existence in sleepdreams   

that lit up a silence as dreadful   

as that of the moon. I have   

an overly-precise recall of

those solitary years before   

I opened the curtain and drew   

upon a universe of want that made   

me so strong I could crack   

spines of books with one hand. 

~Kathryn Starbuck                                                                                                             

Drowning in Wheat

They’d been warned
on every farm
that playing
in the silos
would lead to death.
You sink in wheat.
Slowly. And the more
you struggle the worse it gets.
‘You’ll see a rat sail past
your face, nimble on its turf,
and then you’ll disappear.’
In there, hard work
has no reward.
So it became a kind of test
to see how far they could sink
without needing a rope
to help them out.
But in the midst of play
rituals miss a beat—like both
leaping in to resolve
an argument
as to who’d go first
and forgetting
to attach the rope.
Up to the waist
and afraid to move.
That even a call for help
would see the wheat
trickle down.
The painful consolidation
of time. The grains
in the hourglass
grotesquely swollen.
And that acrid
chemical smell
of treated wheat
coaxing them into
a near-dead sleep.
 

~John Kinsella                                                                                                                                  

Late at Night

My wife tells me she hears a beetle
Scurrying across the kitchen floor.
She says our daughter is dreaming

Too loudly, just listen, her eyelids
Are fluttering like butterflies.

What about the thunder, I say,
What about the dispatches from the police car
Parked outside, or me rolling over like a whale?

She tells me there’s a leaf falling
And grazing the downstairs window,
Or it could be glass cutters, diamonds,
Thieves working their hands toward the latch.
She tells me our son is breathing too quickly,
Is it pneumonia, is it the furnace
Suddenly pumping monoxides through the house?

So when my wife says sleep, she means
A closing of the eyes, a tuning
Of the ears to ultra frequencies.

(It is what always happens
When there are children, the bed
Becoming at night a listening post,
Each little ting forewarning disaster.)

Downstairs there is the sound
Of something brushing against something else
And I try to listen as my wife might listen,
Insects, I say, dust on a table top,
Maybe a knife’s edge against the palm.

But she tells me it’s only
The African violet on the windowsill
Putting out another flower,
And falls luxuriously into a dream
Of being awake and vigilant.

So the house grows noisier,
There are clicks in the woodwork,
There are drips, raps, clunks, things
To make sense of, make benign.

My son and daughter are sleeping calmly,
And the stairs, yes, are creaking,
The wind, I think, or maybe two men,
Where’s the beaker of acid,
The bowling ball, the war hoop
I learned in second grade?

So this is what it’s like when there’s
No one left but you to love and defend.

Outside there are cats in a fight
And they remind me too much of babies crying.
Then the bottle thrown against the stoop,
The sound of something delicate shattered.

My wife stirs, Be glad, she says,
Sound doesn’t carry far, that you don’t hear
The whole of it, cries in the night,
Children in other cities, hurts, silences.

And she’s right, I can’t hear the whole of it,
Or else I hear too much and it’s noise
Or I make it noise because it’s too much.

So I begin homing in on something
Around me, something distinct, my wife’s
Breathing, a window’s rattle. Outside,
Grass is lengthening in the dark,
And sap running up the phloem of the maple,
(Do I hear it? And how the stars must be wheeling!)
And in the far room, my children’s
Hearts are keeping time, for them, for us
Who have begun to listen in earnest.

~Gregory Djanikian                                                                             

Mock Orange

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union—

In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fools of
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.

How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?

~Louise Glück                                                                                                        

Soneto XVII

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

~Pablo Neruda                                                                               

Cartoon Physics, part 1

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down—earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

~Nick Flynn                                                                                     

Hugging the Jukebox

On an island the soft hue of memory,
moss green, kerosene yellow, drifting, mingling
in the Caribbean Sea,
a six-year-old named Alfred
learns all the words to all the songs
on his grandparents’ jukebox, and sings them.
To learn the words is not so hard.
Many barmaids and teenagers have done as well.
But to sing as Alfred sings—
how can a giant whale live in the small pool of his chest?
How can there be breakers this high, notes crashing
at the beach of the throat,
and a reef of coral so enormous only the fishes know its size?

The grandparents watch. They can’t sing.
They don’t know who this voice is, trapped in their grandson’s body.
The boy whose parents sent him back to the island
to chatter mango-talk and scrap with chickens—
three years ago he didn’t know the word “sad”!
Now he strings a hundred passionate sentences on a single line.
He bangs his fist so they will raise the volume.

What will they do together in their old age?
It is hard enough keeping yourself alive.
And this wild boy, loving nothing but music—
he’ll sing all night, hugging the jukebox.
When a record pauses, that live second before dropping down,
Alfred hugs tighter, arms stretched wide,
head pressed on the luminous belly. “Now!” he yells.
A half-smile when the needle breathes again.

They’ve tried putting him to bed, but he sings in bed.
Even in Spanish—and he doesn’t speak Spanish!
Sings and screams, wants to go back to the jukebox.
O mama I was born with a trumpet in my throat
spent all these years tryin’ to cough it up...

He can’t even read yet. He can’t tell time.
But he sings, and the chairs in this old dance hall jerk to attention.
The grandparents lean on the counter, shaking their heads.
The customers stop talking and stare, goosey bumps surfacing on their arms.
His voice carries out to the water where boats are tied
and sings for all of them, a wave.
For the hens, now roosting in trees,
for the mute boy next door, his second-best friend.
And for the hurricane, now brewing near Barbados—
a week forward neighbors will be hammering boards over their windows,
rounding up dogs and fishing lines,
the generators will quit with solemn clicks in every yard.

But Alfred, hugging a sleeping jukebox, the names of the tunes gone dark,
will still be singing, doubly loud now, teasing his grandmother,
“Put a coin in my mouth!” and believing what she wants to believe;
this is not the end of the island, or the tablets this life has been
scribbled on, or the song.

~Naomi Shihab Nye                            

Midwinter

And again, at dusk, I find the madwoman,
Crouched on the stone bridge by the cornfields,
Feeding corn to the fish. Though there are no fish

In the river. The river is dead or nearly so,
The water gray as stolen sleep or spoiled sheets.
The woman looks sheepish. But not like a sheep.

Her skin is sallow. Her hair uncombed. Her coat
Unravelling at wrist and hem. The coat’s woven cloth
Has faded from overwashing and it is the same color

As the haze the fields exude in the morning or sometimes
At dusk, a foggy lavender mist that smells of tin
And fresh blood and of the slender green sticks we burn

When we strip back the garden in the first warm weather....
Not like a sheep. More like a child who has gotten
The sum wrong, but stubbornly knows the sum

Doesn’t matter as much as one thinks....Corn cobs
Drop into the poisoned water. The ghostly cobs
Float and turn like boats made from paper. And the day

Grows colder....When the woman speaks she does not
Look up. She does not take her eyes from the sliding water.
“Feed the fish?” she asks. And then she shudders.

Frightened, perhaps, as I am by the flat sound of her voice.
Or by the sudden thinning of the air. Or by the way
The narrow rim of light over the blackened tree line

Comes and is gone before one has time to see it....
If I say, “We can go home now,” if I kneel down
And say, “We can go home, the fish are sleeping,”

To whom do I speak? And out of what knowledge?...
The water moves like ash. And like ash it makes
No sound. The woman crouched on the stone bridge

Picks from the corn heaped at her feet one pale cob,
And without looking up, she holds it out toward me.

~Brigit Pegeen Kelly                                                                    

Uncle's First Rabbit

He was a good boy
making his way through
the Santa Barbara pines,
sighting the blast of fluff
as he leveled the rifle,
and the terrible singing began.
He was ten years old,
hunting my grandpa's supper.
He had dreamed of running,
shouldering the rifle to town,
selling it, and taking the next
train out.
                                Fifty years
have passed and he still hears
that rabbit "just like a baby."
He remembers how the rabbit
stopped keening under the butt
of his rifle, how he brought
it home with tears streaming
down his blood soaked jacket.
"That bastard. That bastard."
He cried all night and the week
after, remembering that voice
like his dead baby sister's,
remembering his father's drunken
kicking that had pushed her
into birth. She had a voice
like that, growing faint
at its end; his mother rocking,
softly, keening. He dreamed
of running, running
the bastard out of his life.
He would forget them, run down
the hill, leave his mother's
silent waters, and the sounds
of beating night after night.
                          When war came,
he took the man's vow. He was
finally leaving and taking
the bastard's last bloodline
with him. At war's end, he could
still hear her, her soft
body stiffening under water
like a shark's. The color
of the water, darkening, soaking,
as he clung to what was left
of a ship's gun. Ten long hours
off the coast of Okinawa, he sang
so he wouldn't hear them.
He pounded their voices out
of his head, and awakened
to find himself slugging the bloodied
face of his wife.
                           Fifty years
have passed and he has not run
the way he dreamed. The Paradise
pines shadow the bleak hills
to his home. His hunting hounds,
dead now. His father, long dead.
His wife, dying, hacking in the bed
she has not let him enter for the last
thirty years. He stands looking,
he mouths the words, "Die you bitch.
I'll live to watch you die." He turns,
entering their moss-soft livingroom.
He watches out the picture window
and remembers running: how he'll
take the new pickup to town, sell it,
and get the next train out.

~Lorna Dee Cervantes