CONTINUING
One
When my Aunt Doris died I heard it through the air vents,
reverberating
about the guts of our home,
laced with sheet metal
when it hit. A horrific wailing,
a resonance of moisture beads
sucked from lungs. I was twelve, maybe,
and ran downstairs to find my mother
chewing on the phone cord. I wanted to
snatch it from her mouth,
worried she'd be electrocuted, but,
with a flash, knowing
that's what she wanted.
She saw me
and removed the wires from her lips.
I still wish, though, at twenty-seven,
the sight of little me, was also enough reason
for Uncle Anthony. But he never wept,
so he couldn't stop. Since the funeral
he's shrunk into himself,
minimized over the years,
paper curling on a bed of steady embers.
Two
Helen went out with a twelve gauge,
in a snowy field. I dreamt the skull fragments
and facial tissue fountained
into mountain air,
sparkling and popping.
Teeth, eyelashes, petite ears with jade jewelry
turned to camp-robber jays and magpies,
flitting into collective coniferous consciousness.
She hadn't shown for work.
The caller hadn't known my father's extension.
Instead, some pensive, amplified Wal-Mart voice
directed him to answer blinking line three.
My father never alluded
to immediate registration of the news,
but I can see him pounding fists into his pharmacy counter.
Everyone knew
she'd had a thing for him. Her disposition
a sunny window from the fluorescent light,
giggling at his idiosyncrasies as they counted pills.
But my father is a Godly man
whose love spurted then
through pounding hands
as customers fled with wobbly carts
careening into bottles of contact solution,
racks of prophylactics.
Wal-Mart wouldn't allow him leave;
he was fired two weeks later.
¤ ¤ ¤
CHAIN OF DUTY
My wife's passion is
educating on environment, not,
per se, environmental education, but
refining everyone on
everything and even
that's not enough.
She wants her teaching
habit forming, compounding,
stigmatizing,
"Give a man a fish," she says
things like this and that old
"Recycling is a fundamental."
Her desires are intimate
with me. I feel her need
to research, to develop
succinct programs, networks,
matrixes with brown fingers
slapping businesses big and small
with reality checks.
I taste her craving for
small-group counseling, tiny
explosions to trigger
nuclear winter freeze on waste production.
She dreams of selecting
"department leaders" responsible for
wielding green knowledge like a whip.
She mumbles in the bedroom darkness,
"A chain of duty is instilled."
My wife and I are
both aware an individual ceases
behavior when not justified.
She has educated me beyond
the HOWS, beyond the WHYS.
She has a plan of attack,
but I'm never revived enough
after listening to her
speak this in her sleep,
my head shoveled under
my pillow, then casting it aside
and in the morning light
not bothering to separate plastic
from paperboard.
¤ ¤ ¤
TRUCK ACCIDENT
I was injured once
so badly, in fact, I was taken to the point of revelation.
Injured by an eighty-three year old man I never met.
He cried for what he'd done-
and for me, the young man of invisible face-crying
and never driving again, never to visit his children
or their children, but remaining locked at home,
so stationary, like if he were still, and oh so quiet,
he wouldn't have to write me back.
I was injured in an intersection,
and I don't remember the names of the two, three, or four streets,
don't recall much but the clouds and how I knew that morning
when I awoke, I'd be flipped in my truck,
my hand immediately not my own
but something to be cooked free of contagion,
or frozen, or hidden with sautéed onions.
I don't remember the streets or the police
or the dark paramedics like paper cutouts
against the sky-my wife fed me this information.
I was injured and all I remember is the sky
as they cut, pried and twisted
my wedding ring from its circulation stranglehold.
I stared at the clouds, bobbing furry things,
for the first time since junior high,
just staring, not seeing any difference
between my injuries as a child
to the vast injuries loitering, impatient, in my future.
And I wasn't sad, but suddenly relaxed,
just as my wife told me to be.
She told me of the old man when the hospital released me.
I wrote and thanked him, or no.
No, I wasn't allowed to. But I did,
in my mind, over the months it took
to eliminate the smells from my missing
fingernail sockets, remove window glass
from my snapped bird-leg wrist.
Three months quarantined to my couch, arm elevated,
lost in oxycondone as if it were a
sad, sad forest, watching the clouds
through faint pine branches out my front window
again knowing to be afraid
of what I know is coming,
and knowing not to know the difference of pain.
Staring out the window of my living room
I wrote letters to the old guy.
I wrote: I'm OK. Don't worry.
Then I revised it forty-six times, never changing
a word, just how I'd say it,
then finally I wrote:
Nevermind, you can worry,
if you want, for I don't know what I'm talking about;
I'm on drugs that make me forget;
I've already forgotten you.
And I asked the pine squirrels to deliver it,
but they laughed at me.
They knew he'd be dead long before it reached him.
Now I'm healed. A miracle of silence,
it's what I say, not a joke. I'm healed and watch TV
with my good arm there
by my side and hand-in-hand
with my wife.
We watch shows on giants,
stingrays, volcanoes, post offices.
Last night we saw clean-cut boys in
Portland heat up my old prescription
and take it to their veins.
Then the boys looked into the camera
and said they'd forgotten people they didn't want to.
One boy can't go outside because of
the booby traps in the clouds.
I told my wife it mad me angry.
"Maybe," she said, "you should talk to someone about it."
So last night I wrote that old man
and told him I was still angry. Told him
I probably would be until
one of us knew, for certain, he would die.
And by morning the pine squirrels returned his reply:
Nevermind, he said, you can worry
Only if you want.
